


marry me (i'd like to date you)

by pumpkinless



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Engagement, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Galra Keith (Voltron), I hope, Kissing, Low Level Government Espionage, M/M, Meet the Family, Moon Man Shiro (Voltron), Mutual Pining, Road Trips, Romantic Comedy, Slow Burn, THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED, The Proposal (2009) AU, Trans Characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-10-24 09:54:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20704043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pumpkinless/pseuds/pumpkinless
Summary: Shiro is just a simple astronaut with a dream: to command the biggest exploratory mission the Garrison has ever commissioned with his best friend Keith by his side. First, though, he needs to legally become a citizen of Earth.





	1. the proposal (2319: a space odyssey)

**Author's Note:**

> IT'S FINALLY HERE!!!
> 
> no lie, this fic is over a year in the making and i'm so ridiculously excited that it's finally happening. it's sheith! but based on one of my favorite movies! and i can't even remember who helped me out with editing at this point, so i'm going to collectively thank audrey, blue, and most of all hannah for working with me through every one of my world-building induced breakdowns. you people save my life every day.
> 
> and now, i hope you enjoy!

“Declined?” Shiro whispers, throat seizing up at the news. 

His visa—his career, his whole life here. It has to be a cruel joke, it just has to, but Commander Iverson isn’t a comedian and he would never joke about this. The expression on Iverson’s face is miserable: he looks fresh off eating a very hot pepper, face pulled into a pained grimace and sweat beading at his temples, more affected than Shiro has ever seen him. Not even the scalding heat of the desert in the height of summer has ever made Iverson  _ sweat _ in uniform. 

Shiro can’t believe Iverson gets to look like that when Shiro is the one getting his life and dreams crushed by this conversation.

Actually, maybe this is a hallucination. Maybe Shiro isn’t actually hearing what he thinks he’s hearing or seeing what he thinks he’s seeing. It could just be the awful exhaustion from coming off his posting on a hellish diplomatic flight that had too many technical and engineering problems. He hasn’t even gotten to take a nap since landing seven hours ago after a fourteen-hour shift at the helm of an ailing, mid-sized passenger ship.

Shiro will definitely stop hearing things if Iverson and Sanda just let him leave this office and go pass out for the next ten to twelve hours while vowing to never accept a mission again as a glorified chauffeur for diplomats.

But Iverson is here to bring him back down to Earth and Sanda's face is pinched and solemn, sympathetic in a way she never is.

Shiro isn’t hallucinating in the slightest.

“Yes.” Iverson folds his hands on his desk. “Unfortunately. While you were off-planet, the interview deadline for your visa renewal passed and—”

“But that wasn’t my  _ fault,”  _ Shiro protests. His heart pounds and his head spins, leaving him too off-guard to check his tone in front of two superior officers. “Sir, we had unforeseen mechanical problems with our ship. If you just sent them the Olkari report explaining the problem I’m sure we could clear this up.”

Iverson sighs and closes his eyes. “If that was our only problem, this would be a different conversation.” He pushes a datapad to the edge of the desk. “See for yourself.”

Shiro snatches it up with shaking hands. He reads it and feels sick because now it’s indisputable. It isn’t just that he missed the interview—there was another form two months ago, one he swears he turned in, and a third item flagging him in violation of his visa’s on-planet stay requirement. 

Admiral Sanda speaks up for the first time since Shiro walked into the room. “If it was just one thing, the Garrison would have made it work,” she says, her face set in an apologetic expression. “But we can’t make all of this just disappear, unfortunately.”

Shiro swallows, his throat thick with uncertainty. “But . . . but the mission . . . .”

“The mission you haven’t technically been accepted for yet,” Iverson says, but their eyes meet in understanding. The odds of Shiro not being accepted for commander on the Thayserix exploratory mission are astronomical; his name is in everyone’s head, and Shiro has heard whispered rumors that some people chose to apply just for the opportunity to work with him. He doesn’t take that mantle of responsibility lightly.

Guilt hits him like a meteor strike. He hates to let anyone down.

Shiro stares down again at the tablet in his hands, utterly helpless. “I’m not—I mean, it’s not like I’m even an immigrant,” he pleads. “I’m from the Moon, it’s not—”

“But the Moon is, technically, a separate legal entity.” Sanda sighs, and her brow relaxes for the first time since Shiro has been in the room. “I’m sorry, Captain. You’ll have to leave the planet for a year and reapply for your visa. The Garrison will, of course, be happy to welcome you back and sponsor you, but I'm afraid we are not above the planetary government’s immigration policy.” She straightens her shoulders. Her face is severe but Shiro still reads sympathy in her eyes; this isn't her fault or something she wanted to happen. “It’s unfortunate there’s nothing more I can do.”

Sanda lays a hand on his shoulder for a second on her way out, but it’s all the condolence she has to offer. Shiro, still trying to grasp what’s happening, doesn’t manage to muddle together a sentence to say goodbye to her.

His world is unseated.

The door closes and Iverson slouches back in his chair, a heavy sigh leaving him. He becomes the tired officer Shiro knows well. “I wish I could do something, Takashi,” he says. Shiro believes him, of course he does—Iverson has been something of a surrogate father to Shiro since he moved to Earth after being recruited to join the Garrison at eighteen. Shiro trusts him to have fought tooth and nail against this, but it doesn’t make it any easier to hear that he failed.

Shiro turns off the tablet screen and places it gently on the desk. He blows out a breath. “You’ll really help me get my job back? When this is over?”

“Of course.” Iverson turns his attention to the computer panel floating above his desk. “It’s unfortunate that you’ll have to pass the qualifications exams again, but provided you keep your skills up, you won’t have any problems. And I’ll get in touch with a couple people I know at the MSF headquarters up there, they’d be more than happy to have you, even just for a year.”

The Moon Space Force. God, that’s exactly the organization Shiro was aching to avoid when he moved to Earth, but it’s not like he has a ton of options here. The MSF will need cargo pilots or classroom lecturers, and Shiro is overqualified for both, but it’s a job and a lifeline he would be foolish to throw back in Iverson’s face.

“Thank you, sir,” he says instead of letting his anger at the situation explode out of his chest. This isn’t Iverson’s fault.

“You have two weeks to leave the planet,” Iverson says. “I can help you arrange transport for you and your belongings. Do you have anywhere to stay?”

Shiro shakes his head. His grandparents’ house is long sold; they willed it to Shiro, of course, but with the reminder that he should feel no obligation to hold onto it. They knew where his life was, and as much as he loves the moon he grew up on, his home now is on Earth.

“Alright,” Iverson sighs. “I’ll mention that when I talk to my buddy in the MSF, but no promises. You’ve always got one of those newfangled apps you kids are using now—MoonBNB, or whatever.”

Despite himself, Shiro snorts. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll look into it.”

Iverson taps decisively at his keyboard one last time. “I’m sending you a few papers to look over,” he says. “Take care of yourself.”

“Always, sir.”

***

Shiro collapses into his own office chair, more exhausted than he’s ever been. Every single step on the short walk from Iverson’s office was like hammering a nail deeper into his coffin. 

After a long couple weeks in space, this is the last thing Shiro imagined coming back to. Plagued by engines that only ran in reverse and disorientated navigational systems, all he thought about was home: this office, his tiny quarters. Hell, even the cafeteria food is a step up from food goo.

He wanted business as usual. To take a break and spend the next semester teaching the advanced flight maneuvers class to the graduating pilots. 

Shiro buries his face in his hands. That’s not going to happen now.

Shiro is a pragmatic optimist with a short list of worst days of his life. They are, perhaps, easy to guess: the days his grandparents passed away, the day a crashed test flight of a prototype ship mangled his arm beyond repair and nearly killed him, and the day his high school sweetheart of three years broke up with him because Shiro didn’t want to live in their tiny hometown forever. The list isn’t chronological, but instead ordered by how truly, deeply  _ bad _ they were. He remembers the way those days felt, the different forms of grief that took up residence in his heart, and he knows it’s happening again.

There’s no good reason for him to be in his office instead of his bed. It’s not as if he can do anything right now to fix this whole problem, but he needs a moment to think. He needs silence.

Shiro sighs heavily and casts his eyes over his office. He got this room two years after graduation, when he was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and accepted a position as a part-time flight instructor during his months spent planetside. On one level, sure, it’s only a room, just one in a long line of identical offices down the entire length of this hall. But it’s also a breath of fresh air. It’s  _ his. _

The shelves behind his desk host his piloting awards alongside models of rocket ships. Shiro turns in his comfortable, creaky chair and runs a finger over one of them fondly: the  _ Defiant, _ the first ship ever to make contact with extraterrestrial life out by Pluto, long before his own lifetime. It’s hard to imagine now an Earth untouched by the influence of outer space, to think that the house he grew up in on the Moon was nothing more than an impossible dream.

He keeps two pictures on his desk, printed out on thick, shiny paper and stuck in rare pure glass frames. The faces in them peer out every time he settles into his desk chair—the first, a seventeen-year-old Shiro stooped down to swing an arm over his grandmother’s shoulders, his grandfather leaning in from behind them to take a selfie. All three of them look young, and the trademark silver Shirogane hair shines brightly in the sunlight. It was Shiro’s first time visiting Earth, three days before officially signing on at the Garrison Academy, and one of his fondest memories of his family.

His grandparents passed away within a month of each other soon after his graduation. People have told him it’s romantic, that it makes it seem like they didn’t want to live without each other.

Shiro never understood how he’s supposed to reconcile that with the compounded grief of losing his only remaining family all at once. He’s proud to work next to their smiling faces every day, though, and he hopes to wherever they are now, they’re proud in return.

The picture next to it, smaller but also taken under Earth’s blue sky, is from a camping trip out in the desert. A young Shiro grins into the camera, perched on a big, flat rock with Keith sprawled out beside him, eyes closed, face tilted up to the sun, utterly oblivious to the photoshoot going on around him. Keith’s hair is in a low ponytail, his arms bared by a loose tank top. 

He looks at peace, like life is easy. He looks the most beautiful Shiro has ever seen him.

Shiro swallows and looks away. Nothing is very easy right now, not even looking at the love of his life. Not that Keith knows that.

Just then, furious knocking sounds at his door, startling Shiro out of his brooding. He stares blankly at it for a moment and has to shake himself out of it. “Uh, come in?”

It’s Matt, of course, because no one else would dare demand entrance like that. He bursts into the room in a flurry of limbs and a head of regulation-flouting hair, strands escaping the ponytail all over the place. He barely lets the door close behind him before he demands, “Is it true? I just heard from my dad—it can’t be real, right?”

“Does everyone know about my immigration status?” Shiro asks, but it’s a weak retort. He slumps onto his desk, elbows braced just enough to keep himself from face-planting into it. 

“Dude. Shiro.  _ Dude.” _

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Bro. I’ll hack your visa back to life, I swear, just say the word.”

Shiro laughs despite himself, and he finally meets Matt’s eyes. “I think it’s a little late for that, considering everyone apparently knows.”

“Just me! Okay and maybe my mom. But I didn’t tell Pidge, or anyone else. I mean maybe mom or dad told Pidge. But  _ I  _ didn't." 

“News will get out,” Shiro says. He’s resigned to the fact—this is the Garrison. News always gets out one way or another.

Matt shrugs a little and helps himself to one of the chairs in front of Shiro’s desk. “It’s what you get for being so popular, hotshot.”

“I never asked to be.”

Matt scoffs. “It’s wasted on you and that’s unfortunate.” 

“Ugh, don’t use that word,” Shiro says, wrinkling his nose. “That’s all they kept saying in Iverson’s office, how  _ unfortunate _ the whole thing is. But it’s not like anybody’s asking them to put their whole life on hold for a fucking year to get some stupid paperwork sorted out.”

“Shit, man,” Matt says. “Tell me how you really feel.”

“This whole thing is just—look, it’s stupid, right?” Shiro says, throwing his hands in the air. He doesn’t know what else to  _ do  _ with himself now, and the anger flares quickly up from his frustration. “I’m from the Moon, Matt. The Moon. It’s ridiculous that I even have to  _ file _ paperwork for this, okay? What kind of insane government kicks out people from their planet’s moon?”

“Ours, apparently.”

“Yeah, yours!”

Shiro wants to go to the gym. It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t slept in thirty-six hours; he can’t punch the incorporeal mess of bureaucracy like he can a punching bag, and he’d kind of like to hit something right now.

Matt sighs heavily but he doesn’t offer any words of wisdom. Oddly, that’s exactly the support Shiro needs right now, and it sends all his righteous anger blowing out of him at once. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Shiro says, shaking his head. “I can’t stay here.”

Matt surprises him by walking around the desk and hauling Shiro into a hug. They’re not the most touchy-feely of friends—Matt would sooner sock Shiro in the shoulder than give him a pat on the back, and the feeling is mutual—but Shiro needed this. He hugs Matt tight.

There’s some awkward shuffling and coughing from Matt when the hug breaks, but he doesn’t make any of his stupid jokes or say  _ no homo.  _ That’s growth right there. Shiro is almost proud. 

“Does Keith know yet?” Matt asks instead.

“Your dad didn’t tell him too?”

“Nah, just our family. He was the one who had to reject your application for Thayserix.”

Fuck.

“I have to talk to Keith.” Shiro curses again, meaning to keep it in his head but it slips out. 

“Do you want me to tell him? Break the news gently?”

“Yeah, right, gently like a brick to the head.” The words are hollow, but Shiro rolls his eyes to keep up the spirit of the joke. “No, though. It’s fine, I’ll tell him.”

“Better do it soon. It’s not going to be too long before news starts getting around,” Matt advises. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I will.”

***

He doesn’t, of course. Shiro can’t bring himself to text Keith and tell him they need to talk, partly because that sounds way too serious and partly because he doesn’t know if he can handle the conversation. Keith is his best friend and will be understandably very upset, and Shiro needs to collect his thoughts and maybe sleep off some of the panic. 

Instead of calling Keith, he drags an empty cardboard box out of his office closet and packs away all the knickknacks surrounding him, leaving only the things that are absolutely necessary for work. He’ll have to finish the last of his paperwork and transfer all his ongoing projects and class plans to whoever is going to be stepping in for him. However long it takes until they can promote a new captain to oversee his duties.

The office feels bare and empty without his family’s faces peering at him from two picture frames, but he supposes that’s just a teaser for the next year of his life. Beloved as they are, the pictures are a sweet reminder, not a substitute for Shiro’s found family here. He’s used to seeing Iverson, the Holt family, Keith, Allura, and everyone else regularly. Daily, sometimes, if everyone’s on-planet at the same time.

Life is about to get a whole lot lonelier.

Shiro sleeps long and hard that night, falling into bed without even checking his phone to set an alarm. His dreams are convoluted and restless, and he wakes up groggy with a sore neck and no memory of his terrifying dream adventure.

He also wakes up to Keith shaking his shoulder. 

“Keith?” he slurs, blinking up with bleary eyes. It takes him a while to focus, but he doesn’t have his contacts in yet so Keith’s face remains fuzzy. Shiro has no idea how long he’s been asleep, but he has the wild thought that he wishes he could wake up to Keith’s blurry face every morning.

“Hey,” Keith says. His brow is pinched and he keeps drawing his bottom lip in between his teeth to gnaw on it. “Hey, Shiro, can we talk?”

Shiro nods his head and sighs out the last bit of sleep from his system. “Yeah, uh. Um, gimme a minute.”

Keith backs away to let him stumble into the bathroom while locking his prosthetic back into the port on his shoulder. Shiro looks like shit in the mirror, hair sticking up everywhere and eyes reddened with exhaustion. He uses the toilet, splashes some water on his face, and puts his contacts in, trying to shake the grogginess off like a physical weight. Stepping outside, he snags a white undershirt out of his dresser and tugs it on so he doesn’t feel quite so naked standing in front of Keith in just sweatpants. Keith already has his uniform jacket on, the buttons done all the way up to his throat, and not even the hair pulled back into a braid reaching to the bottom of his shoulder blades can distract from how clean cut he looks.

“What time is it?” Shiro asks, startled by the realization. He checks his phone, but it’s dead.

Keith answers for him. “It’s almost ten in the morning.”

“Shit.” Shiro yawns because it’s hard to be too concerned about anything when he’s this tired still, sets his phone on the charging port. “Sorry, Keith. It was a—it was a long mission. What did you want to talk about?”

Keith’s eyes shift from side to side, refusing to meet Shiro’s gaze. He’s anxious and his hands twist together and apart. “You should sit down,” he says. “I don’t . . . .”

Shiro sits and he waits for Keith to find the words. 

“I got a message this morning,” Keith says haltingly. His eyes shine with sadness, and Shiro really hates seeing him like this. “About Thayserix. Because we applied together and you—you didn’t get in, Shiro. I’m sorry.”

“Keith, what do you me—”

Oh god. He doesn’t know.

Of course he doesn’t know. Shiro didn’t tell him, and Matt, for all this roguishness, would never break a promise about something as serious as this.

“Shiro, I’m so sorry.”

An incredulous laugh gets the best of Shiro, and he puts his hands awkwardly behind his head while his shoulders shake with a dry kind of mirth, and he blows out a breath to steady himself. “Um,” he says. “So I have some news.”

“News?”

Shiro drops his arms. He hates not knowing what to do with his hands in any given situation, so he crosses his arms in front of himself and clings to that position. This is the hardest thing he’s ever had to say to Keith, who’s looking at him with big, worried purple eyes. It’s impossible to look him in the eye. “I’m leaving,” Shiro says, just to the left of Keith’s face. “The Garrison, and Earth, and, uh, that's why they can’t send me on the mission.”

“You—what?” Keith’s voice is small, and Shiro feels abruptly guilty. He should have told Keith this last night, or at least looked him in the eye while he broke the news. 

“My visa,” he answers. Shiro tries to keep his voice from going raw, from dipping into the scratchy place where tears are born. “There was an issue—a couple of issues, I guess, and I am being . . . well, I’m being deported back to the Moon.” 

A hand lands on Shiro’s shoulder, and Shiro finally looks up. Keith is—well. His face is devastated, mouth slightly parted and gaping at Shiro in confusion and hurt. Seeing his sadness hurts more than anything else, oddly enough, and Shiro drags Keith into a hug before he can think too hard about it. 

He just needs a damn hug.

They cling to each other. Shiro swallows and then swallows again, harder. He doesn’t want to cry, not now, not in front of Keith, who deserves much more than this wreck of an explanation for why Shiro can’t go to Thayserix with him.

So Keith will go in his stead, Shiro supposes. Command would have been his, after all, had Shiro not been in the picture, though Keith always said he only wanted to pilot under Shiro’s leadership. But he deserves to have this opportunity, too—he’s talented, almost obnoxiously so according to a lot of people, but Shiro has always known Keith is destined for great things. There’s no one in the Garrison Keith can’t outfly, and Shiro happily includes himself within that group.

Keith pulls away from the hug but keeps himself close. The embrace turns to something more intimate than Shiro can handle right now.

“How—how can they  _ deport _ you?” Keith demands, even as Shiro pulls back, just slightly, just enough to leave the grasp of his arms and maintain his sanity, even as he remains in Keith’s orbit. “You’ve been here for years, you work for the Garrison!”

“I know,” Shiro says. He forces out dry laughter because it’s better than a sob. “But it’s still—I mean, I have to follow the rules. My current visa says I have to be planetside or in Earth’s airspace for six months out of the year unless I apply for extra time and—” Shiro shrugs one shoulder in explanation.

“And?”

“I missed it by twelve days. Hard to make that go away.”

“Twelve? Twelve days? You’re from the  _ Moon,  _ not the Balmera or whatever. How can they—no.” Keith shakes his head firmly. “There’s gotta be someone we can talk to.”

“Keith . . . .”

“How is there no way to fix this?” Keith demands. His shoulders, already tense, climb higher up to his chin. “Isn’t there a way you can—you can refile, or something, just with the right—”

“Keith,” Shiro says, as gently as he possibly can. Irony runs deep in that Keith is more upset than Shiro knows how to be. “There’s no way out of it. Iverson tried everything he could, you know he did.” He huffs out a sigh through his nose so he can gather some strength. “I can probably still fly, you know. They have a civilian-run base on the Moon, and I’ll reapply for a visa as soon as I possibly can. It’s not—I mean, it’s not like we won’t fly together ever again.”

Keith is quiet, and Shiro lets him have a moment to himself to process what Shiro is saying to him. 

“You can’t be serious,” he says finally, shaking his head in outright denial. “Shiro, you can’t work for the fucking Moon Space Force, they don’t even have an exploration branch!”

“I know.” It’s the entire reason Shiro came to the Garrison in the first place—he never wanted to work in the cargo-hauling industry or become a commercial shuttle pilot, toting mundane cargo back and forth between known planets on well-worn flight paths. It’s always been about how far he could go, about what else is out there in the universe and how driven Shiro is to find it. But he can make this work. He always does, even when it involves putting his dreams on hold indefinitely. 

Shiro says, “I promise, as soon as this is over, we’ll fly together. After you go to Thayserix—no, don’t look at me like that, you know they’d still take you—after that, there will be more missions. I promise.”

Keith just shakes his head. He fixes Shiro with an impenetrable look. “Shiro,” he starts, sounding so determined. “I wouldn't care if you stayed at the Garrison and we never flew again. I wouldn't. I just.” He stops, looking frustrated with himself, and Shiro pushes down a stupid flash of hope.

“Don't say that, Keith,” he says instead. “You love flying.”

“Yeah, but I love you too, okay?” Keith says it with such determination that Shiro's heart stops in his chest. “You're my best friend. We're—we’re like brothers, right? I don't want you to leave.” 

And there it is. The source of Shiro’s constant emotional dilemma.

Keith is . . . he’s special. Always has been, if Shiro’s honest, even though they were both very different people when they met. Keith had been eighteen and lost, sometimes in anger and other times in the exhaustion of a hard life lived too young, and Shiro was twenty and fresh off a flight accident that threatened not only his Academy training but his entire career. Their hopelessness and anger fed off each other, made them fight constantly, together and with the world. 

But even though their relationship was forged in fire, it’s been tempered to unbreakable steel. Shiro’s never met anyone like Keith, and he can’t imagine he ever will again.

It’s painful, then, that Shiro’s heart tried to ruin it all by falling in love.

But he got over that. Mostly. Enough that he and Keith are great friends, and Shiro isn’t creepy about it at all, even if he still sometimes has fantasies about holding hands. He refuses to let love hold him back from  _ enjoying  _ who Keith is and how amazing their relationship is, even without hand holding. He knows Keith loves him, too, even if it is in a different light and rarely spoken aloud like in this moment. That he calls Shiro his brother is a really beautiful thing in and of itself, even if it does give Shiro an ache he has to squash down so it can’t hurt him where it counts. 

Keith didn’t grow up with any family at all to support him, didn’t even know that his mom—the Galra parent who disappeared without explanation shortly after Keith’s birth—was still alive until his twentieth birthday. It’s an honor that he would consider someone like Shiro to be that important to him. Love comes in many kinds; it is varied and important regardless of the form it takes. Shiro knows that and reminds himself of it frequently. 

Sadly, it doesn’t make it any easier.

“I’ll be fine, Keith,” Shiro says. It’s a promise and a personal commitment—for his own sake, he’ll learn to be okay with everything transpiring right now. “I’ll still talk to you every day, I promise. It’ll just be over a screen, for a while, I guess.” Shiro’s mouth twists wryly. “Maybe you can even come visit me up there before you leave for the mission. You’ve never been to the Moon, have you?”

Keith shakes his head. He still looks troubled and Shiro, even through his aching heart, wants to comfort him.

He puts a hand on Keith’s shoulder. “It’s not the end of the world,” Shiro says. 

“Don’t lie to me,” Keith says. The emotion in his voice is strangely unidentifiable. “This mission is everything you’ve wanted since you were six years old, you told me that yourself.”

Keith knows him far too well.

“It isn’t a lie though,” Shiro maintains, even though it kind of feels like it is. “Look, it sucks, and I hate it, and I’m so fucking mad it’s not even funny but I can’t—I can’t let that control me.” 

“So you’re just giving up?”

“No,” Shiro snaps. It comes out harsher than intended but doesn’t cow Keith one bit. “No,” he repeats, gentler, “you know I would never give up. But it’s just a year.”

“Just a year?” Keith glares at him. He sighs in frustration, clearly casting around for another objection. “What—what about your health insurance? Your doctors are here.”

Shiro has nothing real to offer in response, so he shrugs and manages a weak smile. “I’ll figure it out,” he says. Doctors still exist on the moon, though he concedes that specialists will be harder to come by. The population there is much smaller and nowhere in this system has facilities that compare to the Garrison’s. “You know I will, Keith.”

Keith stares him down. His mouth is slightly open and his teeth are pointier than normal. “I need to talk to Iverson.”

“Keith, no,” Shiro says, but the set of Keith’s face and the flash of his eyes means business. It’s hard to fight with him when he gets like this.

“Shiro, you and I both know that  _ no one  _ is more qualified to command the Thayserix mission than you,” Keith snarls. “No one else has the respect, the flight time, the records, nothing. You have proven yourself over and over again and you deserve this. If you’re not going to fight for it, I will.”

Shiro clenches his jaw and shakes his head. “That’s not enough. Not for this problem.”

“We’re going to make it enough.”

“I can’t—”

“Put your damn uniform on, Shiro. I’m not letting this go until Iverson says it to my face.”

Shiro has a sneaking suspicion that Keith hopes Iverson won’t be able to say it to his face and will, in fact, back down immediately and figure out a way to make it work. But that’s not Iverson. He’s not a man keen on making more work for himself, and he’s certainly not the kind of man who would give up without a strong attempt to find a solution. Shiro trusts him more than that.

Regardless, Shiro changes into presentable clothes while Keith jams his boots back on and waits impatiently right in front of the door.  _ He’s _ not a man who can say no to Keith.

Keith marches them straight into Iverson’s office, his fingers wrapped around Shiro’s left wrist tight enough to bruise. Not many people would be able to physically drag Shiro out of his room, but Keith has that hidden, cheating, Galra strength he likes people to forget about. Shiro never does, but he loves to see it come out.

It’s too bad Iverson’s door doesn’t have a hinge. The noise it makes when it slides open isn’t nearly as satisfying as it would be to watch Keith kick in a door and hear it bang against the opposite wall.

“There’s been some kind of mistake,” Keith says before Iverson even has a chance to look up in alarm at the sudden intrusion. His voice is full of more steel than Shiro has ever heard. “You can’t send Shiro off-planet.”

Iverson is definitely going to need to get that eye twitch checked out. It’s a Keith specialty, and Shiro somewhat fondly remembers the day he first noticed its existence, three weeks after Keith started at the Garrison Academy. 

“Kogane,” Iverson starts with carefully measured patience, “I would love nothing more than to keep him here, but it’s hardly up to me.”

“But how can—”

“You’ll have to make your case to the Department of Interterrestrial Immigration,” Iverson says, not interrupting Keith but speaking over him. 

But Keith is persistent. Maybe too persistent, because he marches two steps closer to Iverson’s desk, hauling Shiro with him.

“You can’t send him away,” Keith spits. If he were a cat, his hair would be standing on end.

Iverson’s eye twitches violently, and Shiro tries to pull them all back from the brink of a physical fight. “Keith, come on, you don’t need to—”

_ “No,  _ Shiro!” Keith whirls on Shiro now, his eyes wide and frantic. His pupils are slits. “They can’t take you away from me or the mission. They can’t.”

“It’s only a year,” Iverson offers, sounding weary. “There will be other opportunities.”

The fact of the Thayserix mission hangs heavy in the air between all of them, and they all know what Iverson is saying. Sometime, in the future, maybe. Probably no opportunities as groundbreaking and novel as the Thayserix mission which is five years in the making and the Garrison’s biggest mission ever planned. 

But there could be something else. Perhaps.

Keith’s fingers flex around Shiro’s wrist and sharp nails prick at his skin. Then he drops the touch altogether. “We’re engaged.”

It takes Shiro a very long time to process that sentence.

Shiro mutters, “We are . . . .”

“Getting married.” Keith's voice is so firm that Shiro himself almost believes it.

“You’re . . . what?”

Keith stares Iverson down with a fury that threatens real bodily harm if challenged. “I told you, we’re engaged. You can’t send him away if he’s married to someone from Earth, right?”

“He would be a legal citizen, but—”

“Okay then.”

Keith has the audacity to actually turn toward the door to leave, like he thinks this is fine. Like Shiro’s brain isn’t physically shutting down over Keith saying words that he’s only ever imagined in his deepest, darkest thoughts. 

Engaged. They’re not engaged. Shiro would definitely remember that happening.

“Kogane, it is illegal to—”

Shiro reaches for Keith’s shoulder to keep him from raging toward Iverson and gets his hand instead. Keith laces their fingers together, like this is something they do all the time. All the time! And like Shiro’s heart  _ isn’t  _ beating eight times faster than it should!

“He’s not leaving,” Keith says stonily. “We’re visiting my family next week to celebrate my mom’s birthday and get her blessing, and then we’re getting married. You can’t stop us.”

Iverson opens his mouth like he’s going to yell, and Shiro wishes he could say something to defuse the situation, but it’s absolutely impossible. Keith is pressing so close, his palm so warm in Shiro’s, and there’s no getting around the fact that Shiro likes the way Keith is standing up for him.

“Sir—” Shiro starts without a finish in sight, but Iverson does something that surprises him. 

He closes his mouth, sits back in his chair, and cocks an eyebrow at the two of them. “Okay.”

Shiro struggles not to let the shock show on his face.

“Okay?” Keith asks, the sound strangled. It’s valid considering this whole thing is a bald-faced lie, and Shiro  _ knows  _ Iverson is too smart to believe it. Coming from Keith especially, on whom he fixes a hard but reasonable eye on the best of days.

“I wish you had told me about this yesterday when we talked, Shiro, it would have saved us both some paperwork,” Iverson says. 

Shiro wants to say something, but all his brain supplies is, “Uh?”

“We had planned on telling you,” Keith says quickly. Shiro doesn’t know when he got so convincing at lying, but even Shiro almost agrees him when he talks about their surprising engagement with such confidence. “The form you have to file, the—the—”

“82-1B,” Shiro murmurs. He didn’t memorize the Garrison’s filing system at his first work study job for nothing.

“82-1B,” Keith repeats.

Iverson says, “The Intimate Relationship Disclosure.”

Shiro knows that one is supposed to be filed immediately upon entering into any relationship between officers, but unofficially it’s mostly used for engagements and marriages. Technically, though, it should have been in ages ago if there was actually an impending wedding.

“It’s a recent engagement,” Keith says.

Yeah. Recent.

Shiro holds his breath but the response turns out to be anti-climactic. Iverson frowns briefly at them and redirects his attention to his computer without further comment on the matter. “Well, you get that form to me and I’ll make sure the both of you are cleared to take leave. I’ll get the paperwork sorted so you can head down to the DII office and file for a fiancé visa.”

Shiro can’t believe he’s hearing this with his own ears from the man who once spent an hour chewing Shiro out for mis-filing a whole gigabyte of equipment request forms as equipment return forms. Iverson cares about paperwork being completed promptly more than any other official goings-on at the Garrison, and there is no way that Shiro is witnessing him shrug off an overdue filing. That’s just not the kind of man he is, and Shiro respects the hell out of him for it.

And yet Iverson doesn’t even give them an annoyed glare.

Keith stands there for one moment, whole body stiff, and then he steps back and pulls Shiro toward the door. He goes willingly, still in shock. 

“Thank you, sir,” Keith says. “We’ll be right on that.”

Iverson grunts.

Shiro and Keith drop hands as soon as the door closes. Keith doesn’t turn to look at him, but his shoulders get tenser with every second that passes them waiting around. After a long stare at the side of Keith’s head, Shiro starts their way down the hall, and Keith follows after he’s gone a few steps already. They walk like that all the way back to Shiro’s room. 

It’s dark inside, only the gloomiest haze coming in through the closed blinds over the window, and Shiro can’t quite bring himself to turn on the overhead light. It looks like a bright, sunny day out there beyond the blinds. 

He doesn’t know what to say, hasn’t been able to form a coherent thought in a little while now, but he needs to say something. Needs to address what the hell just happened and how they’re going to get out of it.

Shiro doesn’t know about a lot of things to do with government, but he knows that lying about your marital status to avoid deportation is illegal. Highly illegal.

Keith is the one who breaks the silence. “I’m not going to apologize.”

Shiro closes his eyes. “I didn’t ask you to.”

“Good.”

The gloom gets to be too much and Shiro crosses the short hallway to flick the overhead light on. It’s a fairly small room, not much to miss on longer missions away, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in creature comforts. The bed has a large, soft mattress, tucked away behind a three quarter height wall, and the kitchenette comes with state of the art appliances. There’s always enough storage space, and when Shiro sits on the couch to gather his wits, he sinks deep into the plush, welcoming cushions.

He really doesn’t want to have to give it up.

“What were you thinking?” The question comes out before Shiro can stop it. 

“I was thinking that I don’t want you to leave.” Keith flops down on the couch next to him. “That I wanna go on the Thayserix mission with you.”

“Keith—”

“Look, Shiro.” He takes a deep breath. “I know it’s not ideal. But you’re my—my brother, practically, and I can’t let you let you throw the best chance of your career away because of some stupid paperwork.”

“It won’t matter when the government finds out we lied,” Shiro mutters.

Keith throws an elbow into his side. “They  _ won’t  _ find out. There’ve been rumors about us for years, and we know everything about each other anyway.”

“But what about—”

“Marrying you is the least I can do,” Keith interrupts, stubborn as ever. “I would do anything I could, Shiro, and this is no big deal.”

Shiro crosses his arms. It’s hardly very grown up of him, but he can’t resist the urge to curl in on himself a little more, just enough to put up another wall to act like hearing the word brother from Keith’s lips doesn’t make him burn with shame. “Marriage is a huge deal.”

Keith shrugs. “To some people, I guess.”

To Shiro, it is, but he doesn’t say that, or the fact that for years now the only person he’s ever wanted to marry has been Keith. And what does it say about him now that the moment Shiro has to reckon with Keith deciding to marry him, he wants to shut it down? Shouldn’t he be over the moon that at least Keith loves him enough to do this for purely political and selfless reasons? That even if it’s fake, he’ll still get the experience of Keith gripping his hand every now and then like they did in Iverson’s office?

It’s pathetic.  _ He’s  _ pathetic, begging for scraps and wanting to send them back to the kitchen as soon as they’re offered. But Shiro’s heart refuses to make sense.

“Maybe . . . maybe marriage is a big deal, when you do it for real,” Keith concedes. “But we can just—we’ll be doing it for simpler reasons, right? Like business partners.”

Shiro can’t imagine anything less simple than marrying Keith as business partners, especially not when he would much rather be marrying Keith for real, as he calls it. But still, Shiro agrees. He feels compelled to; every possible doubt and potential failure-inducing issue sitting at the forefront of his mind, but he does understand that in essence this is easy. In essence, this is just two best friends agreeing to sign a few pieces of paper so they can go on an exploratory mission in space together. That’s really not a big deal, all things considered, and Shiro has definitely contemplated worse things.

Worse things and better things. Is he really, truly, genuinely thinking of this as a possibility?

Shiro takes one look at the datachip sitting on his coffee table, its label proudly proclaiming it as a guide to Thayserix applications and mission parameters. 

It turns out, he is considering it. 

Hard not to, when the Garrison only commissions a real exploratory mission every fifteen years or so, which means he’ll be at least forty-two years old by the next one. Still in the prime of his life for sure, but this is a dangerous profession—he has a prosthetic arm and biweekly check-ins with a therapist to attest to it. There’s no telling what can happen tomorrow or next week or in eight years, no knowing when the tides of luck could turn. That’s why he needs to do everything in his power to make this mission happen now, to make sure that he takes every possible chance to see unknown solar systems and worlds and more possibilities he can’t even imagine.

And he can’t deny that the thought of being married to Keith, even as  _ business partners,  _ strikes him straight through the heart. He wants that. He’s wanted that for a long time.

“Do you have a plan?” Shiro asks, hesitant. 

“I can figure one out.”

Shiro snorts despite himself. “That’s not very encouraging.”

Keith lays a hand on Shiro’s elbow, tugging his arms out of their crossed position so he can touch his fingertips to the back of Shiro’s hand. It’s unforgivably intimate. “Hey. Trust me.”

“You know I do.”

This is weird. He and Keith are close and definitely have no shortage of regular physical contact, but they’re not exactly the hand-holding or hand-touching kind of bros. If they were, Shiro would be a mess constantly.

“And I’m serious about going to see my family. They’ll be glad to meet you, and we can figure out what we want to do,” Keith says, leaning his shoulder into Shiro’s and leaving it there.

The longest he and Keith have been apart since meeting was the year and a half after Keith’s mom fell back into his life. Keith had taken a month-long post out in the Thaldycon System, running interference between a cluster of neighboring planets unable to completely end their decades long war. He requested a second month’s posting. And a third. And then he came clean to Shiro, that he had met his long-absent mother, fresh off her post with an interplanetary spy organization. 

Shiro has only ever spoken to Krolia over crackling, long-distance comms, but the way Keith talks about her means that Shiro already likes her immensely. The thought of meeting her, though, as Keith’s closest friend and possibly fiance, is terrifying.

“This isn’t exactly how I had hoped to meet your family,” Shiro admits.

“Yeah.” Keith pauses for a moment, and he pulls his hand away from Shiro’s, leaving it feeling strangely cold. “I just . . . you know I would do anything I could for you, right? Anything.” He pauses, voice sounding thick for just a moment. “To keep you from having to leave and get you on that mission, I mean.”

Shiro swallows back the lump in his throat. “I know, Keith. Brothers, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, Shiro. You got it.”

Brother, business partner, husband. Shiro doesn’t know what to make of that combination all wrapped up into one person.

Keith sighs, a short, sharp huff of breath. He rubs both his hands up and down his thighs twice and then he stands. “Alright,” he says, almost to himself. “I have to get to the medical bay now. I’ll see you later?”

Alarm flashes in a bright fear. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Keith says, snorting at him. “It’s just my T prescription, I have to pick it up early because of the trip.”

“Oh.” Right. Shiro should have figured; Keith wouldn’t keep something serious from him. “Sorry.”

“’S okay.” Keith offers him a small smile, an island of familiarity in the ocean Shiro is drowning in to be near him. For a moment, he’s just Shiro’s best friend in the entire world: smart, supportive, dedicated. More beautiful than anything else the universe could offer. “I promise, Shiro. This is all gonna be great. You’ll see.”

***

Shiro pops into the Holt Family Lab later that day. That’s not its official name or even actually a place that’s reserved for them, but it’s where Colleen rules with an iron fist and her family, by extension, hides from the rest of the Garrison. It’s a botany lab first and foremost, except for Pidge’s robotics lab tucked away in the back corner and Matt’s 20 square foot computer setup and Sam’s cluttered desk in the other corner. General botany lab, really. Sometimes botany.

He’s careful to not cross the painted yellow line three feet inside the door. “Hey,” he calls out, “is Matt around?”

Colleen sticks her head around a large . . . something plant that bears a weird kind of teal fruit the same size as Shiro’s head. Her interest in xenobiology has been getting more and more consuming lately. “Shiro!” she says. “Come here, I haven’t seen you in forever.”

Shiro steps over the yellow line, a smile pricking at the corners of his mouth as Colleen ducks out of sight for a moment and three loud clangs follow her.

Up close, the fruit smells floral, dizzyingly so, and Colleen reappears stinking of it. But when she throws her arms open, Shiro hugs her anyway, stooping down to wrap his arms around her small frame while she slaps his back enthusiastically. 

“I’m glad to see you made it back from Olkari safe and sound,” she says when they pull away. “That was quite a trip.”

“I wanted to just grab another ship and leave,” Shiro says with a laugh. He loves Olkari and the people there, but he only packed enough clothes for the planned duration of the flight and the washing machines there aren’t quite what he expected.

And had he known what would happen if he didn’t get back to Earth immediately, he definitely would have hopped on the next ship home.

Colleen reaches up and presses the back of her hand to his forehead. “Are you feeling okay?” she asks, brow pinched together in concern. Shiro tries to wave off her concern, but she persists. “You look tired, hun. Did you get any sleep after they told you about your visa?”

Shiro laughs, but it sounds hollow and metallic to his own ears. “I was so tired after the mission I don’t think I could stay awake any longer.”

“I’m sure.” Colleen’s mouth twists and she brushes her fingers over Shiro’s jaw, a caress that reminds him of how his grandfather would pinch his cheeks as a kid. “I’m so sorry about what’s happening. Sam and I tried everything to get them to reconsider.”

A lump rises in Shiro’s throat. “I have a meeting with the DII set up,” he says roughly. “Nothing is for sure yet.”

“Good.” Colleen smiles. “And you put us down immediately if they ask for references, alright?”

Shiro nods. “I will.”

“Smart boy.”

The Holts are anything but a secondary family to him—they’ve cared for Shiro in ways he never could have expected when he became friends with Matt and visited their home for the first time over winter break his first year at the Garrison Academy. Money was too tight back home for him to catch the moon shuttle to see his grandparents, and Colleen and Sam welcomed him into their home and family for Hanukkah and gave him free reign over their state of the art communications system to call his family.

Shiro loves them to pieces; Pidge is basically the younger sibling he never had. He can’t help but feeling like he’s disappointing them now.

“I’m actually, uh, going to visit Keith’s family next week,” he says. “Trying to get a break from everything before everything changes.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful! That’s out in Thaldycon, right?”

Shiro doesn’t bother asking her how she knows that offhand—Colleen is a wealth of too much knowledge she shouldn’t know or rightfully be able to remember. He just nods instead and she hums. “You have Keith come see me before you two leave, alright? I have something for his mother.”

“Of course,” Shiro answers. Another mystery he’ll never solve until she wants him to.

“Well, Matt’s in the back with Pidge, but before you go I want you to promise me you’ll stop by for dinner soon. Preferably before you leave for the moon,” Colleen says. She puts her hands on her hips, uncaring of the dirt on her canvas apron, and she gives Shiro a stern stare.

“I definitely will,” Shiro says.

“Excellent. You just let Matt know when you’re coming, we’ll have a seat ready for you.”

She drifts away without saying goodbye like she does, heading over to another plant that looks even more alien than the first. Shiro smiles to himself and shakes his head, but the warm joy is short-lived. He needs to talk to Matt. Immediately.

Shiro pops his head into the makeshift robotics lab. One day, Pidge will have their own space with millions of dollars of equipment that’s incomprehensible to Shiro, but they have to actually graduate from the Garrison first. Shiro knows for a fact that there’s already a huge empty space with their name on it, but the Admiralty is hiding it from them until they finish their last three months of training and get the security clearance to go that far down in the Garrison’s basement.

He walks in and finds Matt floating upside down in some kind of chamber, long hair floating around him like it’s submerged in water while he reads on his tablet.

“Huh,” Shiro says.

“Yo.” Matt flashes a peace sign without looking up.

“I already know I’m not smart enough to know what’s going on here,” Shiro admits, admiring the mass of wires Pidge is sorting through below Matt.

Pidge shrugs. “You’re not,” they say, but Shiro is pretty sure there’s a drop of sympathy in their tone. Somewhere.

“Mind if I steal Matt?”

“Do I get a say in it at all?” Matt asks, turning his body in a showy flip as he sends his datapad to float somewhere near the top of what Shiro is deciding right now to call the antigrav chamber. Matt climbs out with an unsurprising lack of grace.

“Go away,” Pidge says.

“No,” Shiro says.

“Then take him and go away.”

Matt heaves a fake sob. “I can’t believe my own children would treat me this way.”

Shiro says, “Uh-huh,” and drags Matt out of the room by the wrist, calling out a goodbye to Pidge behind them.

“Geez,” Matt says as the door out of the lab and into the hallway slides shut behind them. He shakes his wrist theatrically, but Shiro’s never had a problem of forgetting his strength in his human arm. The prosthetic is another story, but that’s why he didn’t haul Matt out of the room with it.

“I have something to tell you,” Shiro says. 

“Not even gonna apologize for almost bruising my delicate, delicate skin first, I see.” Matt raises both his eyebrows in mock disappointment.

Shiro huffs. “Look, this is actually serious.”

“So’s my wrist health!” Matt argues, shaking the offending hand limply in Shiro’s face. 

“I—stop that. Matt, stop.”

Matt looks up from where he’s informing his poor wrist that their, uh, nighttime habits won’t be disrupted for anything, much less this. “What?”

Shiro blinks down at him. Twice. 

Time to cut the shit and break the ice.

“Keith decided to marry me so I don’t get deported to the Moon.”

“He  _ what.” _

“Matt,” Shiro says and pretends he isn’t begging. “Matt, I really need a drink.”

***

Matt doesn’t let him open his mouth about it again until they’re both two consecutive shots and a chugged beer deep, and even then Shiro wonders if yet another strong drink would be the next best course of action.

“Are you telling me . . . you’re engaged?” Matt asks. He has both hands spread wide on the table like he’s going to launch himself over it to strangle Shiro at any moment. It’s probably deserved. “To Keith? And technically you’re breaking the law. Okay, first of all, who are you?”

“It seemed like a better idea when Keith said it,” Shiro admits. Then he reconsiders. “Well, no, it never sounded like a good idea, but by the time he told Iverson it was too late to stop him. And he’s technically right—it’s a better idea than leaving for a year.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you wanna fuck him, of course you agree with anything he says.”

“I don’t—it’s not—”

Shiro cuts himself off and Matt snorts his lack of surprise. Matt isn’t right, but he also isn’t wrong, and Shiro doesn’t want to waste time hashing out the nuances of his feelings about Keith, not when he can just flag down the waiter to bring another several shots of whiskey. 

“Man. I hate to say it, but it’s a good idea.” 

“I kno—wait, you what?” Shiro can’t possibly have heard what he thought he just heard.

“Oh come on, I broke the law like three times last week. Do you really think I’m the friend you go to when you’re hung up on something silly like that?” Matt tsks and dives a hand deep into the large basket of fries on the table between them. 

“No offense, but I think the Terran government is going to care about my green card marriage more than your illegally downloaded Arusian porn.”

Matt throws a fry at him. “First of all, stop kinkshaming me, I know just as many gross things about you. And second of all, it’s not like you and Keith getting married is actually much of a stretch.”

Shiro wants to die. “Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying,” Matt says, which is to say he isn’t  _ just saying  _ anything. “If I had to pick two people I thought had the highest chance of eloping tomorrow, I would be picking the same two people as half the Garrison.”

Scratch that, Shiro is dead. “Don’t be an asshole,” Shiro says. His voice is so very weak, and Matt laughs at him with an open mouth full of half-chewed up potato.

“Hashtag sheith,” he says. “That’s what they call you.”

Their waiter appears with the next order of shots, and Shiro doesn’t even let them set the glasses down before he takes it. He’ll leave an exorbitant tip in apology. 

But the whiskey goes down the wrong pipe, unfortunately. It sort of ruins the whole vibe he had going as Shiro coughs his way back to normalcy and Matt laughs at the faces he makes throughout it. Once he can talk again, Shiro just says, “I don’t even want to know.”

“Dude, I know you know about the rumors—everyone thought you and Keith started banging years ago.” Matt shrugs and eats another fry. “That’s why I think it’s a good idea, though. Even if anyone did get suspicious, all you’d have to say is you two like to keep to yourselves. Everyone would back you up.”

Shiro doesn’t want to acknowledge the truth of that statement, so he ignores it and forges onward. “You were supposed to tell me this was a bad idea so I don’t do it.”

“Again, you know I’m the wrong friend for that.”

“Fuck.”

“Mhmm.”

Swiping a fry through the vegan garlic aioli in front of him, Shiro tries to enjoy the taste of flouting his strict diet that definitely doesn’t allow fried food, but it’s a hollow victory at best. He feels like an idiot for some reason. Maybe for agreeing to go along with Keith’s ridiculous, illegal pretend marriage, or for Matt’s complete unwillingness to think about this for more than five seconds and treat it like the serious situation it is. 

“Look,” Shiro says. “It’s not even really the legality thing that’s the problem.”

Matt cocks his head to the side.

“But you . . . you know how I feel about Keith.” A nod. Shiro takes a breath and fortifies himself with a combination of Matt’s encouragement and the alcohol hitting his brain at that very moment. “And I am worried if more feelings get, um, involved, it might get. Well. Complicated.”

“Complicated.”

“He invited me to come see his family,” Shiro says, “and we have to tell them we’re engaged.”

Matt sputters out a laugh. “You really love digging yourself in deep, don’t you?”

“Shut up. Also, you can’t tell anyone about this—I mean  _ anyone.”  _ Shiro levels his best, most terrifying stare at Matt. It’s the same one he uses on particularly unruly cadets, but Matt, naturally, only blinks back placidly. 

He has a lot of problems with authority.

“You’re definitely screwed,” Matt says. “This is the stupidest part of your plan.”

“Oh my god.”

“Look, you guys are best friends and half the Garrison thinks you’re fucking and you and I both know you’ve been in love with him since before he grew out the godawful baby mullet into a real hairstyle.” Matt holds up both his hands to quiet Shiro down until he’s done, but Shiro wants it noted that he doesn’t like where this is going, so he scowls. “But Keith’s family knows him a little better than the average space cadet. You guys don’t exactly have that, y’know, easy intimacy couples are supposed to have, even when you’re alone. They’re gonna notice something’s up.”

Okay, a slightly valid objection. Shiro chews it over in his mind while he eats another fry. 

“I bet we could fake it,” he says. He can see himself doing the little stuff—a hand ghosting Keith’s back as they walk, throwing in a pet name or two when they talk in front of other people. Sitting close enough on a couch that their thighs touch and Shiro has to sling an arm around Keith’s shoulders so they stay comfortable. Would a kiss on the cheek work? On the side of the head, maybe?

This is starting to sound more and more like Shiro’s fantasy life than an actual plan for dealing with nosy future fake-in-laws. 

Still, Shiro would like to dwell there for a while.

“You’ve never even kissed him before,” Matt says with a scoff, interrupting Shiro’s musing on the appropriate time to hold Keith’s hand in front of his mom. “There’s no way his family is gonna believe—”

Shiro can’t control the noise of disagreement he makes. That’s one of the great dangers of drinking in Matt’s presence; he picks up on everything that happens around him, even while inebriated, and Shiro’s filter disappears piece by piece with every drink he downs.

Matt’s eyes get real big and wide as he stares at Shiro. “You didn’t—when did you even—?”

Collapsing into the table, Shiro holds his face in his hands and groans. “It was after his graduation. We were just . . . we were drunk. Keith was drunk and I was drunk and he said he wanted to make out with someone and I—I told him that’s what friends are for.”

“And he bought that?”

Shiro sighs. “We were so wasted.” He rolls his eyes at Matt, who should know a thing or two about drunken hookups. “I don’t know how much he really remembers.”

Wasted though he might have been, Shiro remembers it too well. Keith’s solid weight in Shiro’s lap, his arms around Shiro’s neck and every inch of him made of muscle. Shiro has never met anyone as devastatingly attractive as Keith, and having him, even if just for a moment, will stick with him forever. 

Keith is an incredible kisser. No one’s ever made Shiro feel like that, like his entire life existed just to bring him to that one, all-encompassing moment.

“Stop. Oh my god, stop making that face, that’s—you’re disgusting.”

Shiro covers his face with both his hands again in defense but it’s not as if he can stop himself. There’s nothing worse than learning that your best friend who you’re in love with and also think might be your soulmate is amazing at kissing. Keith knows how to  _ do things  _ with his tongue, things that Shiro thinks about a lot. Especially at night. Shiro knows too much now, and these kinds of things just can’t be forgotten. 

He’s in too deep. For Keith and with Keith, and now there’s nothing to do but pray they don’t fuck this up.


	2. in which #sheith con the government

Shiro wakes up a mere four hours after falling asleep to his phone stabbing him in the back of the neck with a vengeance technology shouldn’t be capable of having.

The door won’t stop chiming. It wants something, or someone outside wants something. Whatever. 

Regardless, Shiro is not emotionally or physically prepared to deal with whatever they want from him. He trips on his way out of bed and stubs his toe on the corner of the archway leading to his bedroom, which is about the worst thing the world could possibly have gifted to his wrung-out, nauseous, exhausted body. By the time he hops his way to the door and stabs the unlock button, he’s ready to open his mouth and completely chew out the asshole on the other si—

Shiro is taken aback. All the air leaves him at once: he likes this asshole.

“Keith,” he rasps. 

“Shiro,” Keith answers dryly. “Mind if I come in? Since you’re not answering messages anymore, apparently.”

“Uh. Yeah, yeah, course,” Shiro rambles, stepping back away from the door so Keith can slide by and kick his boots off in front of the entryway closet. He’s in uniform but his gray jacket hangs open, too casual for him to have anywhere important to be. At least this morning Shiro has clothes on, even if they are the ones he went to the bar in and then accidentally fell asleep while still wearing them. “Sorry, Matt and I were out late last night. I think I went too hard.”

A headache kicks in just then like it’s got something to prove.

“Mhmm.” Keith walks into the kitchen and helps himself to a glass of water. Shiro doesn’t realize what’s happening until Keith presses the cup into his hands and tells him in no uncertain terms to drink it.

Shiro just wants his head to stop pounding.

Keith settles on the couch, kicking his socked feet up onto the coffee table and pulling out his datapad. It’s exactly where and how he always sits when he comes over to hang out quietly with no expectations, so Shiro forces himself to drink the glass of water and go about his day as normal. He dips into the bedroom to take off his prosthetic and leave it to charge up, shoulder aching from forgetting to remove it last night, and grabs a change of clothes for after his shower. He and Keith do this sort of thing all the time, being in each other’s space without comment or consideration, so there’s a familiarity in getting ready for the day with Keith around. 

Something about this morning is different, though.

He exits the bathroom in uniform pants and a plain white undershirt and makes a beeline for the kitchen. Digging around until he comes up with something resembling ingredients for a peanut butter banana smoothie, Shiro plops them all in the blender with a generous scoop of chocolate flavored protein powder. His hangover throbs unpleasantly all over his body and there’s no way he could handle solid food right now.

“Make me one, too?” Keith calls. Shiro hums his agreement—obviously he is. Well, maybe not  _ obviously, _ but Shiro’s grandparents raised him to have manners and he knows about Keith’s weakness for smoothies.

He delivers the smoothie right into Keith’s waiting hand and asks, “What are you reading?”

Keith tips the screen of his datapad to the right as Shiro settles onto the couch beside him. A photo of Shiro disembarking his ship sits underneath a lurid headline proclaiming “Our Sexiest Intergalactic Captain returns from ultra-dangerous deep space mission safe and sound!”

Shiro groans out loud.

Snickering to himself, Keith closes the Galaxyfeed website and takes a gulp of his smoothie. “You were all over the news, you know,” he says. Shiro makes a noise of disagreement, but it doesn’t stop Keith. “Heartthrob star pilot—that’s what they call you—has a ship break down in empty space? It’s a miracle you’re not being mobbed for quotes about it right now.”

Shiro drops his head back against the couch and whines at the thought. “I don’t even know what an intergalactic captain is,” he complains. That’s not a thing and it certainly isn’t his title. It’s abhorrent, the things tabloids and popular news sites say about him—Galaxyfeed  _ actually _ named him sexiest starship pilot in the universe two years ago, bringing a wave of fame that Shiro prays he’ll never have to deal with again. The Garrison had the gall to use it for profit and sent him on a month-long recruitment tour across planets out to the Kuiper Belt as a poster boy for students and future officers coming to the Garrison from off-planet. On Mars, Shiro got mobbed by teenagers just trying to get a cup of coffee and he still hasn’t gotten over it.

Keith gets a kick out of the articles now though; he takes a lot of joy in reading the ridiculous things they have to say about Shiro. Listening to him try to muffle a giggle over the latest headlines usually melts Shiro’s ire away, but vindication only comes when Keith stumbles over an equally embarrassing article about himself.

“You weren’t even a  _ little _ worried about me?” Shiro asks, faking injury.

“You weren’t even half a parsec out from Olkari.”

“Dangerous, there.”

“Shiro, it’s  _ Olkari.” _

Laughter bubbles out of Shiro’s chest, and he shakes his head at Keith. He can feel a soft look settle over his face no matter how he tries to push it back, and Keith only spends another few seconds feigning annoyance. He’s right, anyway—Shiro was never in any danger except from his own rising irritation with each delay, but the tabloid gossip mill is over the top on a slow day. It’s not the first time his death has been rumored over a minor issue.

“Well, I’m glad to finally be back,” Shiro says. He knocks his knee into Keith’s. “And I know you missed me.”

Keith says, “Mhmm.” A smile curls at the corner of his mouth.

Their conversation is so normal that Shiro forgets, just for a moment, that they’re supposed to be engaged now.

Shiro clutches his smoothie tighter in his hand. “So,” he says, forcing a level tone, “we should probably talk about our, uh, next steps.”

“Right,” Keith says, and he lifts his hips up to dig in the pocket of his uniform pants. “Figured we might need these sooner or later.” 

He holds his palm out flat to Shiro, displaying two golden rings: it’s unmistakable what they are and Shiro’s mouth goes dry at the sight. Almost numb, he leans to set his smoothie down on the coffee table so he can lift them gingerly up for examination. The shiny gold bears no inscription or fancy ornamentation—it’s perfectly Keith, in that way, but also perfectly Shiro, considering he’s never been one for jewelry. Anything flashier would just look ridiculous and out of place, but Shiro imagines he wouldn’t mind wearing something like this at all.

“I got Pidge to make them.”

Shiro is holding his and Keith’s wedding rings in his hand. 

_ Wedding rings. _

He wants to lock himself in the bathroom and cry—Shiro hates the way this jerks him around, how his lovesick brain falls for it one moment and then remembers the truth so violently it hurts in his chest. These rings are to fool the government, their friends, Iverson, and anyone else who catches sight of them. 

“Cool,” Shiro says weakly. It’s the most lackluster response imaginable.

Keith plucks the smaller of the pair off Shiro’s palm to slip it snugly on his own ring finger, the motion so casual. He holds it up to the light to watch it gleam, and Shiro can only watch, starstruck. Keith doesn’t really wear jewelry either—he hardly even wears his dog tags, despite the fact that wearing the uniform without them is a flagrant violation of the Garrison’s code of conduct. Seeing Keith with a gold band on his finger looking satisfied and contented is . . . is something else.

Shiro might not survive this conversation if this is how cavalierly Keith is treating it.

“I wasn’t sure if you would want gold,” Keith says. He puts his hand back in his lap and Shiro’s eyes follow it, caught by the tiny glint of metal. “But I figured it’s traditional, and Pidge had some on hand.”

“Yeah, I—I like gold,” Shiro murmurs. “My grandparents had gold rings.”

Keith gives him the soft, reassuring smile he always does when Shiro mentions his grandparents. He never pushes for Shiro to say more or gets awkward at the mention of the dead; he is the one person Shiro can trust unconditionally to support him whether or not he wants to talk about them.

And it’s that thought, that memory, that pushes Shiro back into himself. He clears his throat softly and blinks hard. “It’s good thinking,” he says, ignoring the rasp in his throat. “It’ll make us look more convincing.” Shiro turns the ring over one last time, admiring the smooth gold, and he closes his palm around it tightly. An engagement ring from Keith. Not even his wildest fantasies—well. Maybe the absolute wildest ones imagined this, but Shiro never held any real hope for it. 

Keith giving Shiro a ring to put on his finger and claim Shiro as his? That’s the sort of thing that only exists in some whole other reality.

“I hope it fits,” Keith says. 

“Yeah.” Shiro can’t do this one handed. Slowly, he opens his palm again and offers the ring back to Keith. “Help me put it on?” he asks

He already knows he’ll regret this.

Keith huffs in a little breath. He’s hesitant, taking the ring from Shiro and pushing it onto his trembling finger, past the knuckle until it settles right where it should. It’s a perfect fit.

“That okay?” Keith asks, his voice a deep rumble. Shiro murmurs his assent. His knuckle has a big, faded scar over it from a hoverbike accident when he was eight and still learning how to ride, and the ring sits just below it.

Unexpectedly, Keith covers Shiro’s hand with his own, and then there they are—their hands, together, matching wedding rings glinting up at Shiro. Shiro’s fingers look broad and dark this close to Keith’s, and Keith has a scar of his own arcing across the back of his hand, the tissue raised and healed over jagged. He’s had it since before Shiro knew him and every time he gets asked about it, Keith mumbles something about a sword fighting incident and looks away.

It’s those intimate details that are going to sell this relationship story. Shiro just has to find room to remember them in the middle of his brain shrieking in alarm over Keith putting a ring on his finger.

“Are you nervous?” Shiro asks, swallowing down all of his gut responses begging him to freak out. “About what people will think?”

Keith squeezes his hand before letting it go, and then he shrugs a little, sitting back to take a big gulp of his smoothie. “I guess not,” he answers. Shiro gets frustrated sometimes with how easily Keith can accept things in his life; things don’t seem to phase him in quite the same way and it’s difficult for Shiro to always approach that with grace. “Are you?”

“Yes.” Shiro chews on his bottom lip and glances down at his newly forlorn hand. He misses Keith’s touch already. “I’ve never really thought . . . I mean, the point of this is we get divorced eventually, right? We’ll have to. I—I never really saw myself being the kind of person who gets a divorce.”

_ “That’s _ what’s worrying you?” Keith says, sounding like he doesn’t believe Shiro for one second. 

He shouldn’t. Shiro has a lot of anxieties and they all stem from the basic fact that he’s in love with Keith and, unfortunately, many people he feels close to also know about that. He can’t imagine having to privately explain to all of their friends once the visa paperwork goes through that he’s actually getting  _ platonically _ married to Keith as part of their working relationship, though now it’s bound to come up. Or Sam and Colleen catching sight of the ring and telling him they always knew it would work out.

“A lot of things are worrying me,” Shiro says finally. He knocks a knee against Keith’s thigh. “You really wanna do this?”

“Of course, Shiro. I would do anything.”

_ Anything, _ he says. Keith trusts him so much and Shiro can’t even admit to the depth of his feelings.

Shiro takes a deep breath, and as he lets it go, he forces it to carry his doubts away. They can do this—pulling it off will be easy  _ and _ hard, Shiro imagines, depending on the situation, but Keith is reliable. He doesn’t give up. Shiro would trust him with a lot more than this.

“Alright,” Shiro says. The weight of his acceptance sits heavy.

Keith turns his almost empty glass around in his hands, spinning it until Shiro loses track of which side of the rim he put his mouth on. He stares into it and Shiro watches him, pretending not to watch him, and lets his heart ache with the full force of his affection for this man. They have matching rings on their fingers, and Keith is fiddling with his cup, just like he always does—like nothing has changed.

Tipping his head back, Keith finally downs the last of his smoothie. Shiro’s gaze snaps back to his own cup still settled on the coffee table and he remembers belatedly that he should probably drink that.

“Well, I have to get going,” Keith says. He rises from the couch and walks around the back of it, sweeping a hand lightly over Shiro’s shoulder on the way to the kitchen.

Shiro’s skin prickles and he reaches for his smoothie to cover the twitch in his hand that betrays how much he wants to take Keith by the hand again. “W-what are you up to today?” Stuttering over a touch feels very . . . middle school.

Keith turns on the tap to rinse out his glass and huffs. “Meeting with Griffin,” he says, already sounding annoyed. The braid down the center of his back is messier than usual, and Shiro has to bite his tongue to stop himself from asking if he can fix it.

“I thought you liked Griffin these days.”

“He’s filling in for me in my advanced flight sim class and he thinks it means we have to go over my  _ lesson plan.”  _ Keith says the last word with such disdain that it startles a laugh out of Shiro. “Shut up, okay, you know I don—”

“Don’t believe in lesson plans, yeah, I know.” Shiro grins around the rim of his cup. Only Keith, best and brightest pilot of their generation, could get away with teaching the way he does. 

Keith hates teaching, actually, and doesn’t keep it a secret from either his students or the brass, but the brass manage to trap him into a semester every now and then. His knowledge is valuable, his experience unparalleled, and despite Keith’s no-nonsense approach and brutal expectations for his students, the Garrison keeps him on anyway. Sparkling personality or no, they can’t afford for him to  _ not _ pass on his knowledge and skills, though as far as Shiro is aware, there’s still no one who has come close to matching Keith, no matter who teaches them. Keith is unsurpassed.

“I should just steal yours,” Keith grumbles.

“I’ll lend them to you if you think you can get them past Griffin,” Shiro offers, knowing full well that nothing gets past Griffin except jokes.

Keith cuffs him on the back of the head on his way to the door. “Keep your phone turned on, old man,” he says, softening his words with a hint of a smile tossed over his shoulder.

“I will.” Shiro looks away as Keith bends to tug his boots back on. “You keep an eye out for the visa forms, I’ll get them to you as soon as I can.”

“Bye, Shiro.”

***

Of course Pidge hunts him down.

“Shiro,” they say, flanked closely by Lance, the two of them looking like a gang of bullies in a cartoon about high schoolers. “What the fuck?”

“Yeah, Shiro, what the fuck?” Lance echoes. Mostly he just sounds excited to say the f-word.

Shiro continues stabbing his fork into his salad as he stares at them. They’re the ones invading  _ his _ lunch table and interrupting  _ his _ quiet time. He doesn’t have to put up with this.

“What?” Shiro asks, but he’s not an idiot. He knows why they’re both here, and he knows that Pidge would never back down just because Shiro didn’t immediately crack under pressure and gave them a mildly disinterested look.

Pidge swings one leg over the attached table bench opposite Shiro, their eyebrows raised in a way that makes Shiro eminently nervous for his well-being. Pidge is more terrifying than the rest of their family combined. Showing fear, though, makes him a target, so Shiro schools his face and endures their stare. Lance, arms crossed over his chest, makes a comical backdrop.

Pidge breaks the stare first.

Any victory or relief Shiro might feel about that is short-lived.

“Explain that to me.” They stab a finger right at Shiro’s fork-stabbing hand and glare at it like it’s personally offended them. The ring glints brightly in the light and Shiro wishes there was a way to hide his hand underneath the table. “Explain to me what the hell that means and why Keith has a matching one.”

Shiro shifts in his seat. “Um,” he says. Somehow, Shiro has no words prepared, no idea of what he should say here. What has Keith already said? Is there a story Shiro should stick to in explaining this to their friends? The only thing he knows for sure is that he shouldn’t reveal anything about his impending deportation—it’s easier to let them know nothing about it so they can’t thread the trail of evidence together.

“What do you mean?” Shiro asks. Playing dumb works in the movies sometimes, right?

“I will literally murder you if you don’t tell me everything that’s happening right now.”

Shiro takes a big bite of salad, stuffing it into his mouth until he can’t fit any more into his bulging cheeks. He can’t talk if his mouth is full to bursting.

Pidge, who learned patience and stubbornness from a family that probably invented those qualities, waits him out. It isn’t hard—Shiro is actually quite sensitive to the expectation of people wanting something out of him, so he gives in far faster than he wishes he would. 

Still, he has to finish chewing, so he has a few precious extra seconds to consider his answer.

“It’s not a big deal,” Shiro says. He delicately sets his empty fork down so he can fold his hands in his lap—beneath the table, out of sight, a blessing in disguise—and tries to figure out what lie he’s going to pull out of his ass. Preferably something that’s smart enough to fool Pidge but still won’t make it sound like Shiro’s lost his mind. 

Though maybe he has. 

Lance bends at the hips to lean down and peer at Shiro with squinted eyes. “Is Keith blackmailing you into this? Blink once for yes.”

Shiro glares at him.

“Is he paying you off? Holding someone hostage?” Lance’s voice gets louder and louder with every question. “Oh my god, no, you sent him nudes, and in Galra culture, that means you have to marry him. Please, just tell us it wasn’t nudes, Shiro!”

“Holy shit, can you keep it down?” Shiro hisses, rising half out of his seat. “We’re trying to keep this quiet, okay?”

“Keep  _ what _ quiet?” Pidge asks, slipping deftly into the conversation as soon as an oddity can be found in Shiro’s story. They’re too smart for their own good.

“We just . . . need some privacy,” Shiro says, “to figure this all out. I mean, me and Keith haven’t even talked about what we want to say to people, we don’t want it to get out before—”

“Nuh-uh, no way, you are _not_ playing the privacy card with us,” Lance butts in. He harrumphs and crosses his arms. “You know, last time Keith tried to get one by me like this—”

“Shut up, Lance,” Pidge and Shiro say in unison.

“Assholes.” Lance shuffles in closer, a deep scowl on his face, and pins his gaze on Shiro. “We still know you’re hiding  _ something.” _

“We do,” Pidge agrees, folding their fingers together and resting their elbows on the table. “This is your chance to tell us before I go find out the fun way.”

That’s not an idle threat, Shiro knows, but it doesn’t make him anymore amiable to opening his mouth and spilling his guts. However, these are his friends asking him sincerely—if weirdly—what’s going on with Shiro and Keith, and he doesn’t want to hide more from them than necessary. Besides, Pidge and Lance are likely to be important resources in the upcoming legal process as Shiro gets his damn visa sorted out, potential character references for his and Keith’s relationship. It would be bad, strategically and interpersonally, to push either of them away.

“Look,” Shiro says, hesitant. Lance is unsubtle about leaning in closer, while Pidge doesn’t even blink. “This is a secret. You can’t tell anyone yet while we figure out how we want to go public.”

“Never.”

“Obviously.”

Shiro doesn’t believe either of them for shit.

“Keith and I are getting married,” he starts, and braces himself for an onslaught of emotion before he can explain the rest of the story.

It never comes.

“Oh, thank fuck!” Pidge blows out a huge breath of relief as they slump back. “he’s finally admitting it.” 

“Knew we could get him to say it,” Lance says, sounding far too smug. The two of them have the audacity to high-five right in front of Shiro.

“What the fuck,” Shiro says.

“Don’t be a dick,” Pidge says, rolling their eyes. “Keith comes into my lab demanding I make him two golden rings and then says  _ no,  _ they’re  _ not _ wedding rings? As if. I called it, like, ages ago.”

Lance is less humble. “We totally won this. Suck it, Keith.”

Shiro abruptly feels like he’s missed something crucial. “Wait, what are you guys talking about?” he asks, already dreading the answer.

“Look, Shiro, no one is, like, surprised by this,” Pidge says. They glance side to side and lean in. “We _know.”_

Shiro’s hand grips the edge of the table hard and he swallows thickly. Sweat beads at his temples. “Know what?”

“Okay, okay, still playing it safe, we get it.” Lance raises his hands in surrender and finally drops to sit on the bench next to Pidge. It doesn’t make Shiro feel any less menaced, but at least he doesn’t have to keep glancing back and forth between the two of them.

Lance winks.

“O-okay,” Shiro says.

“We’ll keep it a secret for now,” Pidge promises,  _ “if  _ you put in this requisition form for a compact dark particle accelerator. To go in that new lab I’m not supposed to know about.” They produce a datapad and slide it across the table so Shiro can read—it’s already filled out with his name and rank, missing only a signature. Great.

“There’s not a—”

“Please, Shiro,” Pidge says, rolling their eyes. “It’s on sublevel D, room 12. It’s a nice space, but  _ this _ is really going to make it special. Send in the form, and I won’t say a word about you and Keith to mom or tell anyone I knew before you two went public.”

Leveraging Colleen is a new low, but Shiro shudders to think how crushingly disappointed she would be that Shiro didn’t trust her enough to come talk to her. Even if Pidge isn’t cornering him over his impending deportation, the marriage is still going to be a damn big deal on its own. Is this what being blackmailed is like? Shiro sighs and pushes the datapad back. “Forward it to me, I’ll get it sent in.”

“Excellent.” Pidge smiles brightly. “I’m glad we could talk this out.”

“What do I get? I know the secret too,” Lance complains.

Pidge shrugs, clearly not concerned at all about Lance. Shiro considers it for a moment, wonders if there’s something he could say to buy his silence, and it comes to him in a flash.

“I bet Keith would love to find out you were the one who told everyone,” Shiro says. “I’ll be sure to let him know.”

“What?!” Lance flails his arms around in indignation, but Shiro already knows he’s won. 

A voice interrupts Lance’s screeching.  _ “What  _ what?”

“Hi, Hunk,” Shiro says, but his voice is overpowered by Lance screaming even  _ louder _ in surprise. Their table gets a few dirty looks, and that’s more than fair.

“Hey, Shiro.” Hunk starts to set his tray down, but he hovers a few inches above the table before making contact. “We, uh, we are eating together, right?” He looks uncertainly to Shiro.

“Shiro’s eating,” Pidge says. “We’re extorting him.”

At the end of the day, Lance and Pidge are the least of Shiro’s worries, but it’s better that they don’t know that. Lance cackles in the background like a deranged rabbit. Shiro does his best to ignore him and gestures for Hunk to sit down—he’s the least likely out of anyone to blackmail Shiro or start randomly screaming. Hunk is more of a whimperer, and Shiro appreciates that about him a lot right now.

“Is this about Keith and Shiro getting married?” Hunk asks once he’s settled.

This time, Pidge screeches.

“Can you stop that,” Shiro hisses, but he’s overruled by Pidge’s running mouth.

“How did  _ you _ find out?” they demand, socking Hunk in the shoulder. He makes a wounded noise and shrinks away, but Shiro is probably the only one who notices.

“Keith, um, told me?” Hunk says, both his eyebrows raised high. “Was it . . . supposed to be a secret?”

Shiro tunes out the explosion of noise as the three of them talk over each other to explain and accuse. It’s not a surprise that Hunk knows—he’s Keith’s closest friend, after Shiro. It’s good that Keith has someone to vent to about his feelings, just like how Shiro vented to Matt over a seriously ill-advised slew of drinks, and Hunk is probably the most understanding of their group of friends. Or at least the most likely to offer a shoulder to cry on instead of a thorough clowning.

The argument on the other side of the table crescendos and the drops abruptly into silence. Lance’s arms are crossed and Shiro has no idea what just happened. 

“Lance . . . .” Hunk sighs.

Pidge just rolls their eyes and turns back to Shiro. “Anyway,” they say. “Thanks for doing business with me. Looking forward to seeing a blind copy of the form hit my inbox when you send it in.” Pidge gets up from the table, shooting Shiro a lazy peace sign and a wink. Shiro offers a salute with his fork.

“Sorry,” Hunk says, but it’s unclear who he means to apologize to. It could be all of them.

Shiro sighs and offers a reassuring smile. “Not your fault,” he says. “I’m glad Keith had someone he trusted enough to tell about all this.”

“He should trust  _ me,” _ Lance grumbles. He’s soundly ignored.

“You can trust all of us,” Hunk says with a big smile. He picks up a chicken strip and elbows Lance. “Even him. We’ve got your guys’ backs.”

“We’ll come out when we’re ready,” Shiro promises. That much is certain—Shiro anticipates the press will be all over them both when that time comes, not to mention the Garrison gossips. “It’s important to Keith to get his family’s blessing, first. We don’t want anyone important to find out from the news.”

“Fair,” Hunk says. “Also, I’m planning your engagement party, right? Keith said he didn’t know if you guys even wanted one, but I put together a menu just in case and I really think you’re gonna want to hear this . . . .”

A reluctant grin breaks over Shiro’s face, paired with a warm glow in his chest as Hunk pulls out a datapad to show off the lengthy list of hors d'oeuvres and desserts he has in mind. Even Lance leans in with interest, his fingers finding the pile of fries on Hunk’s plate as he moans over the menu with far too much pornographic joy. Shiro is so very thankful for his friends, obnoxious as they are, and it soothes him to know that their opinions on this engagement are only positive. Maybe in the future Shiro and Keith will come clean to them about what’s really going on here, but for now, their support in a world of uncertainty means everything.

Shiro just hopes everyone else will be as supportive.

***

Shiro gets a message marked  _ URGENT _ just as he’s contemplating going back up to the counter to grab a vegan muffin to take back to his office for an afternoon snack. It’s from Admiral Sanda, requesting his presence in her office as soon as possible to go over some paperwork.

He is not graceful exiting the cafeteria in his haste.

Sanda greets him with the warmest smile Shiro has ever seen on her, which is to say it’s a fraction shy of severe. His deep respect and slight fear of her leads him to offer a salute upon entering, something he never normally bothers with when meeting with Iverson or, truthfully, any of his other commanding officers.

“Captain,” she says, gesturing to the seat across from her desk. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Shiro sits ramrod straight, perched nearly on the edge of his chair. 

Sanda fixes him with a stare. She doesn’t sit, but instead remains standing behind her desk chair with both wrists settled on its backrest, peering down at him with an unreadable expression on her face. She holds a datapad loosely, no doubt open to a file on him. Shiro feels distinctly like he’s being called into his old Commander’s office for breaking curfew back when he was a cadet. 

“I’ll cut to the chase,” Sanda says after a long stretch of oppressive silence. “I received a message from Commander Iverson that you’ll no longer be needing the Garrison to provide transit off-planet once your current visa expires.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You are engaged to be married, is that correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.” His heart pounds at each word.

“And yet when I spoke with you yesterday in the Commander’s office, you made no note of having a fiance here on Earth. Is there a reason for that?” 

Shiro’s internal organs feel all messed up, anxiety and fear warring within him. He’s terrified to lie, for  _ many  _ good reasons, and a clear one is that being caught in the act jeopardizes not only his visa, but his whole relationship to the Garrison. And possibly his status as a criminal.

“You, um, you caught me off guard a little yesterday,” Shiro confesses. That part, at least, is true. “And truth be told, we—Keith and I, I mean, we like to keep our relationship private. I wanted to talk to him first.”

Sanda hums and turns her attention to the screen of her datapad. She squints at it for a moment before glancing back at Shiro.

“Shirogane,” she says, which is about as informal as she ever gets. Sometimes Shiro wishes he could give off the same kind of effortlessly commanding aura that Sanda does. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that if you are in fact misleading us, both you and Captain Kogane will be severely punished, and not simply here at the Garrison.”

Shiro squirms in his seat. Sanda’s office always reeks of a sharp, chemical scent that reminds Shiro of working at the local MoonDonalds during high school, and it puts him on edge as soon as he enters. When he gets nervous, the smell becomes overpowering. 

He says, “Of course, ma’am,” and tries to subtly breathe in through his mouth.

“I’m giving you one chance,” she says. “Right now. This won’t go on your record, or Captain Kogane’s, and we would simply proceed with your visa renewal in a year’s time.”

Shiro is pretty sure she can smell fear, or at least feel it emanating through the air between them. He wants to swallow to clear up the thick feeling in his throat, but he doesn’t want to give her a tell to latch onto. 

Sanda leans forward just slightly. “Do you have anything you need to tell me?”

Shiro breaks down and swallows. He can’t speak otherwise. 

He hates lying. Hates it with a passion, and he does his best to never do it. He also doesn’t have a lot of experience with it or of dealing with the very physical effects it gives him: heart racing, body flushing with warmth, dread in his stomach, and his hands shaking ever so slightly, even the prosthetic. He folds them together in his lap to hide it and tells himself this is all worth it.

“No, ma’am,” he says, looking her dead in the eye. He won’t stutter; he won’t break down. He refuses. “There’s nothing to tell.”

Sanda presses her lips together tightly and nods once. “I see,” she says. A lengthy pause interrupts her, and Shiro knows it is designed to make him break. “You’ve been a model officer since you started here, Shirogane, and I greatly appreciate your working with me on this. However, it is my job to ensure that the Garrison is free of liability in cases like this. I’m sure you understand ”

“Of course.” Shiro offers her a small smile to attempt to demonstrate just how calm he is, how chill the whole situation is. Of course he’s engaged. Of  _ course _ he’s not lying about it. Of course this is all routine procedure. “I’m more than happy to meet with you, Admiral, and I appreciate that you’re committed to your job.”

“Excellent.” Sanda taps at her datapad again. “I have forwarded you a list of next steps in order to ensure a smooth process as we get your immigration status certified. I trust you will complete them accordingly.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Shiro says. 

His datapad pings to tell him the message is received.

***

“We have to file in  _ person?”  _ Keith demands.

Naturally, after recounting the entire story in his apartment following dinner in the cafeteria, that’s what Keith chooses to focus on. Shiro has to hold back an inopportune grin—of course Keith is more outraged at the concept of waiting for hours in an office than he is worried about Sanda’s concerns. 

“I already got the morning cleared on your schedule,” Shiro confirms. “I had to do it this way when I moved here, you know.”

“Shiro, it’s 2319. This is what technology is for.”

“And yet,” Shiro says, tipping his datapad so Keith can see the screen demanding their presence at the Department of Interterrestrial Immigration office. “It’s really not so bad, if you ignore the fact that it’s five thousand miles away in Tokyo.”

Keith shakes his head and pushes the datapad away. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s expedited,” Shiro says, knocking their shoulders together. Waiting in line gives Keith hives, but he’ll just have to put up with it tomorrow. “There’s an online application process that takes longer, but if we go tomorrow, we can get the initial paperwork out of the way so I can re-enter the planet after we visit your family.”

“I hate when you’re logical.”

“Uh-huh. Some more logic for you—do you want to stay over?” Shiro asks. The nerves return to his belly suddenly. “We’re supposed to be a couple, after all. Couldn’t hurt to play it up a little.”

Keith studies him with an inscrutable expression, his brows drawn together in a way that normally indicates his confusion. Shiro can’t imagine what for.

“It’s been a while since we had a sleepover,” Keith says, finally dropping his gaze.

“All the more reason to.”

Shiro takes their plates to the dishwasher to hide the fact that he’s nervous. There’s nothing for him to be uneasy about, really—if Keith doesn’t want to spend the night, it won’t change anything. Still, the open invitation hangs over his head. 

Keith says, “Do you have popcorn?”

Shiro resists the urge to put his head in his hands and laugh at how quickly that question breaks the tension within him.  _ Does he have popcorn.  _ Does he also know that the mean orbital velocity of the Moon is 1.022 kilometers per second and that he loves Keith with every fiber of his being? Or that Keith turns his nose up at popcorn unless it’s covered in an amount of butter that can’t possibly be healthy, even for a half-galra with no body fat to speak of?

But Shiro doesn’t say that. It sounds too much like love, and they aren’t faking it for the public right now.

“Of course I have popcorn,” Shiro answers instead, even though his heart pounds miserably at Keith’s lit up face. The response Shiro experiences is overwhelming, and he turns away from Keith again to hunt through the cupboards. Only they can save him from his blushing face.

“You’re a good pretend husband,” Keith says, sounding pleased. 

Despite his commitment to nonchalance, Shiro angles his head just right so he can see Keith out of the corner of an eye. He acts so at home here, more so than Shiro’s ever seen him exist in any place except his own. But Keith notices nothing of this, too involved in whatever he’s doing with his datapad. Reading through the visa process, maybe, or just checking messages after a long day. Whatever it is, Keith decides to be done with it while Shiro is still watching, leans up to put the datapad on the far side of the coffee table, screen dark, and reaches for the television remote.

Keith is certain of his place in Shiro’s life, sprawled over all the empty and full spaces alike, and he uses it to his advantage to select one of his much-loved and incredibly boring shows about fishing. 

That’s one of those traits you fall in love with. Quirks that not everyone knows about—for Keith, it’s an inexplicable love for shows about fishing and occasionally ocean documentaries. Shiro’s tried to ask him about it before, but all he got was a handwave and a vague answer. Why fishing shows instead of literally anything else, Shiro may never know, but it’s Keith’s  _ thing. _

So the night goes as it always does—Keith never says yes or no to the question about expanding their hang out into a sleepover and never asks explicitly for anything, instead just allowing himself to be welcomed in. Shiro makes popcorn over the stove the old fashioned way, a compromise: Keith loves butter and salt and fat, and he would eat nothing but the microwave stuff for a week if left to his own devices, but Shiro can’t stand the thought of putting all those chemicals into his body. So Keith gets his bowl of buttery, arguably disgusting popcorn, and Shiro throws a dash of hot sauce over a much smaller bowl for himself. It’s domestic, in its own way. 

Keith thanks him absently when Shiro returns to the couch, popcorn and a whole fistful of napkins in tow. Keith’s hand lands easily in the middle of the bowl when Shiro sets it down while his eyes stay on the television, completely caught up in following the harrowing adventures of deep sea fishing on some planet Shiro has never heard of before. 

In Shiro’s opinion, this is the most tolerable of the fishing shows, because the hosts, a Galra and an Arusian, travel to a new planet each episode to talk about marine life, local fishing customs, and even popular recipes. It’s mildly educational and is great for background noise as Shiro still settles on the couch with his phone firmly clutched in hand, firmly committed to letting the noise just wash over him while he does something else. He pulls up Words with Friends and prepares to kick Lance’s ass into the ground with just one hand.

Lance is really bad at Words with Friends. 

“Have you thought about our story at all?” Keith says after Shiro completes two incredibly satisfying rounds and Lance texts him an angry face. Sweet triumph.

“Our story?”

“Yeah, like relationship story.” Keith’s hand digs around in the popcorn bowl, even though there’s plenty of popcorn right on top. His hand must be covered in butter. “We gotta have something to tell immigration, right?”

“Oh.” Shiro loses all ability to concentrate on his game, and he turns the phone screen off with a deliberate tap. He’s not going to ruin his record of trouncing Lance just because Keith distracted him. “Just . . . keep everything the same, I suppose.” He mentally reviews the possibilities. “Uh, maybe we got together a year and a half ago, and I proposed a couple weeks ago? Nobody knows because we wanted to tell your family first.”

“Why do you get to propose to me in this story?” Keith argues. “I bet I would have to ask you out, too. You’d be too busy pining and trying to be my family.”

God. That’s—that’s too much, too close, but Shiro scrambles to cover how it makes him feel. Keith can’t know how  _ real  _ it is, how much Shiro is absolutely the pining idiot doing his best to live up to Keith’s expectations of a brother. Blood brother, brother in arms, brotherly friendship; whatever Keith wants, Shiro wants to be it for him. But hearing Keith casually dissect a fake Shiro’s fake personal relationship to his fake feelings is . . . .

Well. It’s not great.

“You can propose to me if you want,” Shiro says, swallowing back the hoarseness in his throat. He wishes the TV and the stupid fishing show was louder so he could focus on that and lose himself in banality.

“I  _ was  _ the one who got us rings,” Keith says. “I should get to propose.”

“Alright. You can propose.” Keith can propose any day he likes.

Keith stuffs his face with another handful of popcorn. “Good.”

They subside into silence for a brief moment while Shiro tries to decide if any of this conversation is really happening.

“My mom will like that,” Keith offers. 

And there’s the fun part: Shiro still isn’t ready to meet Keith’s mom—much less the rest of his extended Galra family—at least not under these exact circumstances. 

Generally, Shiro doesn’t like to pry. He’s curious about the things Keith doesn’t tell him, but he never wants to push beyond Keith’s comfort level. That’s what makes the topic of Keith’s family so strange—Keith loves them, undoubtedly, but he’s a private person. Shiro knows more about them than most anyone else, but what information he has is still vague, and none of it helps calm his somewhat irrational fears about meeting them.

It’s about to be a lot less vague, though, if Shiro really is to meet them. He’s nervous.

“You haven’t been home in a while,” Shiro says, attempting to make the most neutral statement possible. “Are you excited to see your family?”

Keith chews his answer over for a moment. “Yeah. It’s hard to get the time off, I guess,” he says. He shrugs a little. “It’s—I mean, I think it’s an important one, mom’s birthday. I don’t know much about the significance, but fifty decaphoebs is special.”

“Galra thing?”

“Galra thing.” Keith smiles, rueful. He picks through the dregs of the popcorn, searching for the tiny broken pieces that get absolutely drenched in butter. “Too bad they don’t have books about this stuff, right? I didn’t even know. When she invited me to come, I told her I couldn’t go because I had to teach, and then I got a call from my uncle five minutes later threatening to make my life hell if I don’t make time for it. Mom didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but I guess it is.”

Shiro laughs as the story reminds him of his first years at the Garrison. “My grandparents used to do stuff like that when I was in the Academy,” he tells Keith. The memories are tinged with bittersweet nostalgia, sepia-toned and precious in his mind. “My grandpa would never get upset if I said I was too busy to come home when he missed me, but I’d always check my messages later and grandma had sent me tickets for the express shuttle. She never took no for an answer, I’d just have to study on the trip.” Shiro swallows against the sudden lump in his throat and blinks hard. “Sorry,” he says roughly.

Keith knocks their knees against each other and wipes his fingers off with a napkin. “Don’t be,” he says, so soft. “You know I love hearing you talk about them.”

“Yeah.” Shiro sighs and shakes himself out of it—his grandparents only ever got to meet Keith the one time, but they adored him instantly. Being around Keith’s family could be hard for Shiro; it’s been years since he was immersed in that kind of love outside of his relationship to the Holts. He’ll never forget the ache of mourning his grandparents, but Sam and Colleen never fail to balance treating him like a third child with acknowledging what he’s already lost.

Keith’s family is the unknown. Their (hopefully) welcoming Shiro in as a future member is going to be a whole other story.

“C’mere,” Keith says. He shifts his now empty popcorn bowl out of the way and pulls at Shiro’s shoulder.

“Come—where?” Shiro asks, confused as he tries to follow Keith’s lead, but he doesn’t understand what Keith wants. It feels like Keith is trying to guide him to lay down on the couch with his head in Keith’s lap. But there’s no way—

“Come  _ on,”  _ Keith says impatiently, yanking at Shiro’s shirt.

So Shiro acquiesces to Keith’s guiding hands and lays down with his head in Keith’s lap, blinking in shock. It’s a bizarre position, but only in the sense that all of Shiro’s alarm bells are going off because this is completely new territory. With his cheek pillowed on Keith’s thigh, every breath sounds too large in his head, and the television screen moves, quiet and unclear in the background.

And then Keith starts touching his hair. Combing his fingers through the long parts, rubbing a palm over the undercut, right where it feels prickly and strange. It would be soothing, if not for the utter confusion filling Shiro’s very soul.

“This is, uh, new,” Shiro says manfully. He doesn’t want to scare Keith off because it feels so damn good, but he needs something of an explanation. Anything. Before his heart explodes out of his chest.

“Galra have very strong senses of smell,” Keith offers. He tugs at a lock of Shiro’s bangs. “Mine’s not as good, but we should make sure we smell kind of . . . .”

“Engaged?” Shiro asks. His voice cracks on the word. Embarrassing, but Keith doesn’t stop. Shiro is unsure if that’s a curse or a blessing.

“Heh. Yeah, I guess that’s it.”

“And touching my hair will just . . . do that.”

“Yeah.” Keith shrugs and the motion tugs gently at Shiro’s hair. “Galra thing.”

_ Galra thing. _ Their code word, no matter how many impossible to understand things they apply it to, absolutely fails to account for  _ this. _

The position does not become comfortable—every one of Shiro’s nerve endings is on the highest alert, sensitive to each new influx of touch. Goosebumps rise on the skin of his left arm and he tucks it against his chest, trying to curl over it. He shouldn’t have worn a T-shirt, but it’s not like he ever expected this was coming.

It doesn’t end until Keith yawns long and loud, and Shiro gets to scold him for staying up so late.

“You’re up just as late as me,” Keith points out.

“I slept in,” he says, beginning the process of sitting up. His whole body is reeling from the sensation of Keith’s touch—the lack of hands in his hair now helps to clear his mind, but he’s going to dream of this for days. “Besides, we’ve got an early day tomorrow, and you’re right that neither of us should be up.”

“Yeah, fine,” Keith says. His voice is raspy with sleepiness, crackling at the lowest part of his register. Shiro is careful not to look at him while he clears the coffee table, hustling the popcorn bowls back to the kitchen and dumping out the unpopped kernels. He leaves the bowls in the sink to deal with in the morning, takes a deep breath, and turns around.

Keith has his arms stretched high over his head, another yawn breaking. Shiro follows him immediately, covering his mouth through the worst of it.

“You got blankets for the couch?” Keith asks.

Shiro does, several of them, and he helps Keith pull a fitted sheet over the awkward curves of the couch. One of the blankets—and Shiro will never say which—he bought especially because it was advertised as for species whose internal temperature is lower than the average of the planet they live on. Perpetually cold, Keith snuffles deep into it on the nights he stays over, curling his body around the thick fabric, and Shiro sleeps easier knowing he isn’t shivering throughout the night.

It’s the first blanket Keith pulls over his body after they brush their teeth together and Shiro stands in the archway of his bedroom, waiting to turn off the lights.

“Night, Shiro,” Keith says with a small smile, face already soft with sleep.

Shiro swallows. “Good night. Sleep well.”

The lights go off and Shiro climbs into bed, sinking deep into his covers. He falls asleep thinking about hands in his hair and dreams about Keith brushing his fingers over every inch of Shiro’s body with the same attentive care.

It’s the hardest love has felt in a while.

***

"Stop fidgeting."

Shiro tries to still his hands, busy twisting over each other as he stares down the long line in front of him. He doesn't quite register it fully, jammed with aliens of all shapes and sizes clutching datapads issued at the front desk with all of their requisite paperwork. Shiro and Keith finished filling theirs out twenty minutes ago—every last question about their relationship history and Shiro’s immigration status—and the lack of distraction will be his downfall.

Keith pokes him in the shoulder. "Okay, now stop humming."

He hadn't even realized that noise was coming from his own throat, but Keith is right. He needs to calm down.

"Sorry." Shiro sighs. "Just not sure what to expect, I guess."

Keith is sympathetic but he still arches an eyebrow in confusion. "Thought you told me you came here when you moved to Earth?"

"Oh, I did," Shiro says. "My grandparents came with me. It was, uh, a different situation, you know? Everything was sponsored and expedited by the Garrison."

"Right," Keith says. He shuffles his feet a bit. "Hey. You trust me, right?"

Shiro frowns and swings his head around to stare at Keith like he's grown a second head. "Obviously," he says. "Of course." There isn't a universe within the multiverse in which Shiro wouldn't trust Keith—with his life, his body, his soul. It's simply not possible. 

Keith sidles closer, oblivious to Shiro’s indignant, internal rant. His shoulder brushes Shiro's, then his elbow, then he's tucking his hand into Shiro's, fitting their palms together and putting their fingers side by side. Shiro's heart jumps, races, finds a cliff and throws itself into the depths below—it's like being lit on fire and doused in liquid nitrogen at the same time. He doesn't know how a human body is possibly supposed to contain this, and it’s just a  _ hand hold. _

Is there any way to become immune to this? He’s pretty sure he’s felt that before.

But he can't very well deny how it feels or turn Keith away. Keith is right to touch him, especially now when they need to look more than ever like they have nothing but pure intentions and a strong, close relationship. Shiro squeezes Keith’s hand and Keith shoots him a small, private smile. 

The line shuffles forward and they follow along with it, and slowly Shiro’s body adjusts to the sudden influx of sensation brought on by Keith’s touch. Keith’s hand is warm and dry, smaller than Shiro’s but sure in its grip. 

They’re holding hands. It sends Shiro’s distracted, nervous mind to a screeching halt, unable to focus on anything but Keith’s touch. It’s like something out of Shiro’s besotted dreams, except there’s no weird dream logic around to make flowers sprout in the press of their palms. 

Shiro yawns despite his hearty sleep schedule recently. A uniformed officer pushes past them in a hurry, shouldering Keith and four people in front of them off to the side. Keith scowls but holds his tongue, certainly a feat if the furrow in his brow is anything to go by. 

He's facing Shiro now. 

"Come here often?" Shiro teases. It's almost familiar ground, making fun of Keith when he's grumpy, but the words come out far too deep. Flirty, almost, which is not what Shiro was going for.

Keith just scowls harder in response. "I hate people," he says.

"I know." Shiro looks over Keith's head when he notices movement, but it's just the person in front of them shifting their weight, not moving forward. "I think I kinda hate people too when I'm dealing with them like this."

"I wouldn't believe you if you told me otherwise."

More minutes pass in silence and slow trudging down the hallway. The din of the room makes it impossible for Shiro to stay in his head, and all of their electronics were confiscated on their way in. Keith looks just as bored as Shiro feels, and eventually he just leans forward and plasters himself against Shiro's chest with a tiny  _ mrph. _

It’s the damn cutest thing he’s ever seen, and the worst thing his heart has ever had to contend with.

Reaching the front of the line is the hardest, longest, most boring thing Shiro has ever had to do. Somehow, though, it's also the fastest lightning strike of a moment he's ever experienced in his life: Keith is warm and solid, his body closer to Shiro's than it's maybe ever been. Keith gives up on holding Shiro's hand just minutes into his full body collapse of a hug, and instead he gets his arms around Shiro's waist and holds him there, tight to his body. 

Shiro curses him for doing this to Shiro's heart and then curses himself for wearing his leather jacket today. It stops him from being able to feel Keith's full presence, dulling the proprietary set of his arms.

Shiro’s not sure if all the touching they’re doing is necessary. As far as he can see, there’s no immigration officers watching them and no other couple with their hands and bodies all over each other. He can’t imagine  _ this _ being a necessary prerequisite in a government hallway that’s just a little too warm to be comfortable. The proof of their relationship is in pictures and phone records, in the countless people who have seen them spar in the Garrison gym and leave together for dinner afterward, seen Keith worked up and sweaty with his hands wrapped in black tape and giving Shiro the kind of grin that would drown out the sun. Anyone who’s seen them like that, seen Shiro’s face when he watches Keith in his element and thrilling for a fight, they would have to know how Shiro feels. Keith and Shiro don’t have to fake anything but an easy romantic backstory that barely violates the truth of their friendship.

And yet here Keith is, clinging like a koala bear, his strong limbs deeply distracting. No one else in this line is so blatantly proclaiming a relationship. They shuffle forward in line without disentangling, and Shiro's hands rise from their awkward but innocent position on Keith's waist to his shoulders, pulling him deeper into the hug. Like this, Shiro can rest his chin on top of Keith's head, feel his alien soft hair brush against the thin, sensitive skin of his throat, and there just aren't words for how it makes Shiro feel to know Keith's vulnerability.

This is the most torturous experience of Shiro's life.

Finally, finally,  _ finally _ they reach the front, though Shiro doesn’t dare check to see how many hours have passed. Reluctant to let go of Keith, Shiro doesn't begin to remove his arms until there's only one person left ahead. Keith blinks tired eyes at him, his bangs slightly ruffled and frizzy from where they were rubbing against Shiro's henley. 

"Ready for this?" Shiro asks, his throat dry and cracked like the desert.

"Mhmm."

Keith smooths down his hair, tucking one long strand behind his ear. It falls out and Shiro's hand swoops in as if on autopilot—he has to fix it, has to right what he can for Keith. Keith's eyes shine with maybe-amusement as Shiro carefully places the strand of hair back in its place.

He wants to take care of Keith.

"Number 39905, approach station 19."

"That's us," Keith says.

"Let's do this."

Despite his past experiences with the Department of Interterrestrial Immigration, it surprises Shiro how much human contact is involved in this process still—especially at the initial stages. They're not doing anything more than filing a few forms today, nothing that necessarily requires another person to look at them while they do it. But that's the fun part of bureaucratic work, he guesses. Not everything can be automated.

"Hi," Shiro says to the bored looking desk worker. "I'm here to file for a fiance visa?"

He gets a disinterested hum and fingers tapping on the desk for the datapad with his forms on it. Shiro offers it up, sliding it underneath the glass barrier.

The worker taps quickly at the datapad to sync it with the computer system, instantly uploading all their information to the government’s files. It feels very final and Shiro wishes he still had Keith’s hand in his to hold.

Something beeps, and the hands processing the paperwork still just long enough for Shiro to recognize that something is wrong.

"Is there a problem?" he asks, hesitant. The hubbub of the office feels oppressive in his nervousness, and Shiro leans as close as he can to the bulletproof glass separating him from behind the desk. 

"No, Captain," the worker says without looking up from their computer screen. Efficient. "It appears a file has already been opened on your case, you're set to go with an interview. If you both will please follow the lighted blue pathway, an officer will be in to speak with you shortly. Thank you."

Shiro shares a glance with Keith. He’s just as confused as Shiro.

Stepping back from the desk, Shiro murmurs his thanks and casts his gaze about for a blue path. It flickers on in front of him, LED lights embedded in the floor trailing down the long room and out of sight. Keith makes a noise like he's impressed and starts on his way, leading them down through a tangle of hallways that all look the same until it dead ends in front of an open door. 

"It’s weird that there's already an interview," Shiro says, sitting in one of the two chairs waiting in there. He doesn’t want to say anything more in the likely event that this room is monitored.

Keith shrugs, crossing his arms and leaning against the back wall. "Maybe the Garrison expedited it."

"Maybe."

Those are famous last words, though, because the next hour or so of Shiro's life passes in the most excruciating fashion. Everything he said about waiting in line back there, about how it was boring and sucked? He was wrong. He wants to take it all back and move onto a better part of his life that doesn't involve starting at blank walls and an empty desk. The walls and ceiling are completely smooth—poured concrete or a similar material, no cracks or lines to trace with his eyes, and the desk is just a hollow, three dimensional rectangle with a tiny line of imperfection in the middle where the computer screen rises from. Shiro is so desperate for something to do and fill his time with that he plays with the skin around his nails and tries to get Keith to play a word game with him.

Keith is very bad at word games. He would probably be a great opponent for Lance in Words with Friends.

"How much longer are they going to keep us in here?" Keith says, finally flopping into the second chair. Shiro can only guess at how long he's been standing, because of course the room has no clock.

He hates this with a passion.

"I wish I knew," Shiro says. He sighs. They don't even have water to drink.

"My mom is gonna be pissed if we can't come for her birthday because we were stuck in an immigration office," Keith points out. 

"It's ironic," Shiro says, though he doesn't dare say why. Coming into the office to fake an engagement for a visa and being defeated not by the system or the people, but by the long stretch of boring, awful time, certainly  _ feels _ ironic. 

Shiro doesn't say this lightly, but at this rate his eye is going to start twitching every time he remembers how long they've been here.

It's a lot of times.

Then the door bangs open. Shiro, who is not used to doors that have hinges, nearly catapults out of his seat in sheer terror at the explosive noise.

An immigration officer stands in the doorway, sunny smile in place, and Shiro feels sort of like he's been left to wander the desert and this is the first living face he's seen in days. The man is a welcome sight—bushy orange mustache and all, and Shiro forces his fingers to uncurl from their death grip on the chair.

Unfortunately, these are the metal fingers, and the chair will probably never recover. Rest in peace.

"Hello, Captains Shirogane and Kogane, it's excellent to see you both today!" the officer booms, shuffling over to settle behind the desk. He drops an armful of datapads on the surface and ignores two that nearly fall off the side. 

“Hello, sir,” Shiro says diplomatically, even though he desperately wants to stack the fallen datapads so they aren’t at risk of being destroyed.

“It’s great to see a young couple like you in here—and getting married! Too many kids waiting too long these days if you ask me, why, back in my day, we weren’t even past our first snarflagarg by the time we were engaged! Nothing wrong with giving it some time, of course, but when you’re in love, why  _ should _ you wait?” His grin is like a high beam, and Shiro smiles uncertainly back. He’s known a few Alteans in his life, but he’s never heard of a—a  _ snarflagarg. _ “And both such bright boys working for the Garrison, too! I doubt either of you have anything at all to hide, do you?”

Is that a joke?

“Uh,” Keith says. Shiro doesn’t know whether or not to stop him from speaking; this is not what he expected. “We—don’t?”

The officer’s face turns thunderous for reasons Shiro can’t fathom. “A likely story!” A datapad goes flying, clattering to the floor with a death knell of a crack, but no one moves to pick it up. “My name is Officer Coran Hieronymus Wimbleton Smythe, and I’m here to get to the bottom of this, understand?”

For the record, Shiro would like to say that when he thinks of an immigration officer, he imagines someone austere. Quiet and efficient, perhaps. Someone who . . . looks like they work for the government, at least. Officer Smythe is wearing a light blue capelet over a white shirt with ruffles all down the front, and Shiro isn’t exactly fashionable himself, but he knows that’s strange. The room feels much more hostile than he knew to prepare for, and Officer Smythe, for all his initially friendly and bumbling demeanor, is clearly someone to be reckoned with. That realization is unsettling.

“Sir, uh, Officer Smythe—” Shiro starts, but a waggling finger cuts him off.

“Nu-uh, my boy, you can both call me Coran! I don’t want to come off as too intimidating, you know.” Coran throws a big wink in their direction, but his mustache obscures so much of his face that Shiro struggles to tell if his mouth is set in a smile or a frown.

“Coran. Right.” Shiro takes a breath and reaches over to rest his hand lightly on Keith’s knee, trying to keep it casual. Coran’s eyes track every movement. “Well, Keith and I wanted to thank you for seeing us on short notice.”

“Well, that’s no problem at all, boys. I assume—Keith?” He points and Keith nods. “Which makes you Takashi.”

“Please, call me Shiro,” Shiro says, forcing a polite smile. This is fine. Coran is nothing like any of the immigration officers Shiro has known in his past, but he’s taken cultural diplomacy classes at the Garrison for fun _and_ profit, he just has to—to apply that knowledge.

“Excellent, the big one is Shiro!” Coran pulls out the top drawer of the desk and unceremoniously sweeps every one of the datapads inside it, except the one on the floor, which Shiro supposes will just be left to decompose there. The clatter and lack of care hurts Shiro’s soul, but he’s hardly about to try and criticize the man in charge of his fate, especially not one so mercurial. Instead, Shiro waits with bated breath as the computer screen flickers to life in the air between them and Coran hums under his breath while scanning through their application information. Keith stiffens beside him.

“I only have one question for the both of you before we get started,” Coran says. Shiro decides then that the mustache-hidden mouth must be set in a smile, because there’s no way that tone of voice could indicate anything else. “Are you fellows committing fraud to avoid Shiro’s deportation so he can keep his position as Captain at the Galaxy Garrison?”

Shiro is apparently very bad at reading facial expressions.

“What?” Keith says in an admirably even tone.

Shiro struggles not to faint. His smile turns to plastic on his face. “Where did you hear that?”

“Well, you see, we received an interesting call from the great Admiral Sanda herself, who seems to think there’s something fishy going on here.” Coran crosses his arms and leans back in his chair. “There’s some confusion about your motives, young man!”

“Oh, I actually spoke to the Admiral yesterday,” Shiro hurries to say. “I’m sure she understands now that—”

“And  _ we _ heard from her as early as this morning!” Coran scrolls through the open file and lands with an excited  _ aha  _ on whatever proof he’s looking for. “No more than four vargas ago.”

“She’s mistaken,” Keith says. Shiro glances over at him in surprise and finds that Keith has that look on his face that means he isn't giving in any time soon. All of Shiro’s cultural diplomacy classes highly recommended against voicing strong disagreement, but that’s not Keith’s way. “We’re not hiding anything about our relationship, from her or anyone else.”

Coran’s mustache twitches and his eyes narrow. “Allow me to explain the process that is about to unfold here, gentlemen,” he says. “Step one will be a scheduled interview—oh, and this is no doubt my most favorite part! I’ll put you each in a room, and I’ll ask you every little question a real couple would know about each other. Easy, right? Step two!” Coran lurches to his feet and slams his palms on the desk, staring wide-eyed at them both. “My  _ absolute _ most favorite part, you see, so I’m sure you’ll want to pay attention.” His voice gets louder with every word. Shiro swallows and nods and prays Keith is going the same. “That’s when I get to dig deeper, as deep as I want. I look at your phone records, I talk to your friends, I interview your coworkers and everyone you've ever worked with. Are you with me?”`

Numb, Shiro nods.

“And if your answers don’t match up at every point, which they should! So if they don't, then you, number one”—he stabs a finger in Shiro's direction—“will be deported indefinitely, and  _ you _ , number two”—Keith this time— “will have committed a felony, punishable by a fine of 389,002 GAC and a stay of five years in Earth's federal prison! I'm sure you can both appreciate the gravity of our situation here, eh, boys?”

“Yup,” Shiro says, faintly. That's some real gravity.

It’s enough gravity that Shiro hits a mental breaking point. Maybe they really shouldn’t do this. It’s not worth the consequences if they’re found out—not when it could mean destroying both of their lives so thoroughly. It would be better to just own up to it now, before they’ve made any declarations they can’t take back.

He’s scared. Shiro is  _ scared _ and he doesn’t know what to do, and not even knowing that Keith is there next to him helps.

But Keith surprises him once again. When he speaks, he sounds steady and sure, and Shiro has never considered Keith a particularly good or bad liar, but it turns out he has some incredible skill. “We already understood that coming in here,” Keith says. “We didn't come here to lie.”

Coran eyes them, obviously still suspicious, and he drops back down into his seat. "Take me back to the night you met, boys, how’d this little love story of yours begin?"

"Well," Shiro says, putting his polite, diplomatic game face back on. This is the part that isn't a lie, and he's practiced for it. He can do this; he won’t let Coran psyche him out. "I was a junior officer at the Garrison at the time, and Keith was in our newest incoming cohort. We met in a class I was retaking to—to relearn how to fly after I lost my arm.” Shiro flexes his metal fingers; he hates talking about this. “We didn’t hit it off, but we were close by the end of the semester."

"Is that when you started dating?"

"Oh, no, that was years after that. We've only been together—what, about two years?" Shiro turns to Keith, silently begging him to say something and take the pressure off Shiro. He takes Keith's hand in his own. "But we were close friends for a really long time, until one day it just seemed to . . . to become more, you know?"

"Ah, young love," Coran says, twirling a finger through his mustache and grinning at the two of them. Or—maybe grinning. Shiro’s vision has a few spots at the corners and it’s very difficult to tell any of these things for sure. He hopes it’s a friendly expression, at least.

Keith clears his throat. "Yeah, it was just like that," he says, gently squeezing Shiro’s hand. "I didn't think he liked me very much."

"You were a troublemaker," Shiro says, unable to take his eyes off Keith’s face.

Keith shrugs, but he shoots Shiro a sly, smug grin. He winks at Shiro. "What can I say?” he murmurs, his voice pitched low. “You were hot and I wanted to get your attention."

Shiro's face flushes bright red and he looks at his knees. Hearing Keith call him hot in that tone of voice is—is too much, even knowing it's all for show in front of Coran. God, he’s going to have very weird and confusing dreams about that voice.

"Ah, nothing quite like the good ol’ friends-to-lovers tango, is there?” Coran says, perking up as he starts to mark notations on their file. "One of the best romantic tropes, wouldn’t you agree? Back on Altea, we have a whole genre of our finest literature dedicated to it—I don't suppose either of you boys have read any?"

They shake their heads no, and it oddly makes Coran deflate with disappointment.

"Well, make sure to look it up! I'm sure you'll find it very instructional."

Shiro’s not sure what the right response is here. Is this an immigration fraud interview or a book club? He offers the most neutral response possible: “Okay.”

"That's what I like to hear," Coran says, and gives them a cheesy thumbs up. Maybe the way to Coran’s heart is validating traditional Altean literature, and if so, Shiro is going to do as much research as possible before they have to meet again. "And so now you're here, seeking a fiance visa! Not quite ready to go back home, are you, Shiro?"

"Uh, well, no," Shiro says. Which is maybe stupid to admit to, but he believes that as much honesty as he can inject into this, the better. Besides, the DII has already significantly documented the numerous reasons he would prefer to be here instead of, say, anywhere else without a competent space exploration agency—not that the Garrison is perfect, but he has far more options there than he would back on the Moon. "But, you know, that's not really why we're here."

"No?"

Keith steps in swiftly, forever a knight in shining armor that Shiro doesn't get to swoon over. "It was awful," he says, affecting a voice that only sounds in passing like his actual one. Keith lilts his tone, lifts his base octave, and he sounds so convincing that even Shiro believes him for a moment. "Finding out the government wanted to send him back? To the Moon?"

Coran hums with sympathy. “A most distressing time for you both, I’m sure.” His ability to bounce back and forth between barely civil menace and genuine-sounding concern is terrifying. 

“I don’t want to lose my fiance,” Keith says. He holds Shiro’s hand tight, and every time they touch is still a revelation to Shiro’s heart. 

Shiro can’t be outdone. They have to sell this, to present a united front. “We want to get married,” Shiro implores. He reaches his free hand over so he can hold Keith’s hand tight in both of his. “We want to start the rest of our lives together.”

“Good, good! And I see you’ve also filed a planetary leave request to obtain family approval. That’s important in many Galran cultures, you know,” Coran says. 

“Of course. We want to do everything right,” Shiro assures. “It’s Keith’s mom’s birthday, as well, so it’s—”

“Very auspicious.” Coran rubs at his chin and casts a critical eye over them. 

“Yes,” Keith says.

They should have sat closer together to sell this, Shiro thinks. As soon as they walked into the room they should have nudged their chairs together so Shiro could press his thigh against Keith’s. Present unity on every level possible.

One handhold, in comparison, can’t be nearly as convincing, no matter how much it means in Shiro’s heart.

“Well, who am I to deny your visit?” Coran taps at the screen with a flourish of his hands. “Your leave is approved, boys! I’ll be keeping track of you while you’re gone, mark my words, and I’ll see you next week when you return. Don’t want to slow this process down—there are criminals to catch out there, you know.”

“Of course,” Shiro says, sweating. Criminals. Oh god, he’s definitely one of those now. “Thank you so much, Coran, I swear we won’t let you down.”

Shiro holds Keith’s hand tight. Keith clears his throat and says, “Thank you very much, sir.”

Coran squints at them one last time. He twirls his mustache again and doesn't look either convinced _or _unconvinced, so Shiro takes it as a cue to stand up and offer his hand to shake.

"Watch yourselves, boys," Coran warns as he clasps Shiro's hand tight. It's a weird warning to get—is there going to be someone following them around, all the way out to Thaldycon to make sure they aren't lying about anything?

Maybe Shiro should spend the rest of his life holding Keith's hand. Just in case.

"Good to meet you, sir. And thank you again for meeting us on such short notice," Shiro says. Keith mumbles a vague assent and shakes Coran's hand as well.

They're shuffled out of the room with more confusing, half-threatening phrases that make Shiro feel even more nervous than he already was. Coran sets them on another LED path, lime green this time, and it whisks them to the end of a hall with a check out counter. Shiro fills out a little survey asking  _ Tell us how we did today _ while Keith finalizes the details of their off-planet leave request.

He can’t believe he wasn’t arrested.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading!!! <3 as always, i love to hear your thoughts & you can find me on twitter @[disloyalpunk](https://twitter.com/disloyalpunk)


	3. united spacelines: the voyage home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> really wish I knew why the "there was only one bed" tag keeps changing to all caps when I save it......oh well, sorry for yelling there!

Shiro stares out the window of the spaceport at the black emptiness surrounding the commercial spaceship he’s going to board soon. It’s a huge beast of a thing running on a hydro-fusion engine that Shiro estimates has to be at least fifteen years old, and it looks about as rickety as it sounds.

“Huh,” Shiro says. Diplomacy is the way to go. 

A dry laugh comes from behind him. “Are you gonna be okay?” Keith asks, not trying to hide his mirth. Shiro turns to look at him, eyeing Keith’s long legs sprawled across one of the bench seats at their loading gate, and he considers his answer.

Shiro hasn't flown interterrestrial commercial since an overnight school trip to Saturn when he was fourteen, and he's learned a lot about maintenance standards and safety certifications in the meantime. The worst thing to happen then was an ill-advised game of Truth or Dare that resulted in Shiro confessing an unreciprocated crush. Today, he knows to worry about far worse. And even though Shiro has gone a lot farther in space than this line will take them, he was always the person piloting. The Thaldycon System is closer than Olkari, but it’s basically in the middle of nowhere—that cluster is mostly unsettled territory and terraformed crop producers. Shiro is a city boy in comparison and he is not used to rickety old ships that never see a tourist season or a regular mechanic.

“I’m fine,” Shiro says, a bald-faced lie. He walks away from the window, determined not to look at it anymore. “Are you?”

Keith just rolls his eyes and turns his attention back to the datapad in his hands. He’s either doing actual work or watching dog videos, completely nonchalant about the whole situation while Shiro is about to vibrate out of his skin with nervous energy. Keith booked their flights because he has taken this trip several times now. Shiro trusts him in choosing United Spacelines for their travel.

That does not make him love being unable to pilot the ship. He sighs, unable to keep it inside, and looks back at the window again: the ship still looks like a titanium death trap.

“Jeez, Shiro, take a load off,” Keith says. He sits up, feet falling to the ground to make room for Shiro. He’s in casual clothes today—a sweatshirt, worn jeans that show off the muscles in his thighs when he sits down, and stompy black boots, scuffed up but well cared for. Shiro’s pretty sure those boots are older than his friendship with Keith, and it’s a weirdly attractive concept.

“Sorry,” Shiro says, not sure if he’s apologizing for his anxious pacing or for checking Keith out.

Keith slaps his hand on the seat next to him, a clear enough signal that Shiro gives in and collapses into it. He slumps down, trying to get comfortable on the hard plastic, but the bench gives him no sympathy.

“Do . . . you wanna talk about it?” Keith prods.

“Talk about what?”

Keith casts a long look at Shiro’s knee, his leg bouncing uncontrollably. It’s horribly out of character for Shiro.

“Whatever it is that’s making you nervous,” Keith says finally. “If it’s about my family—”

“No,” Shiro says. He turns his gaze back to the window; if he looks closely, he can see tethered workers floating around the outside of the ship, poking at panels and running diagnostics. “No, it’s not them.”

Shiro got the full rundown on Keith’s family during their flight from Earth to this spaceport. Family trees and lineages spin in Shiro’s head, tangling up in each other. It’s important to know them, though, according to Keith—important to his family, to their heritage. 

It’s also important that Shiro knows how private and secretive Keith’s family is. How much they depend on and care for their own.

But that’s still not what’s bothering Shiro. Meeting Keith’s family is inevitable and Shiro is, generally, quite good with people. That gives him confidence that even if it’s awkward, he can get through nearly anything Keith’s family could throw at him. 

Commercial spaceports and spaceships, though, are . . . unfortunate.

“The ship is perfectly safe,” Keith says under his breath. 

“I never said it wasn’t,” Shiro argues. Keith snorts. “It’s just—what’s that look for?”

“I didn’t think you were the kind of person who got snobby about taking public transit, is all,” Keith says.

“I’m not  _ snobby,”  _ Shiro complains. He resists the urge to cross his arms. “Sorry I’m not a fan of being crammed into a tin can with a thousand other people and a pilot who barely passed flight school.”

“How did you think we were getting there, then?” Keith asks. It’s a reasonable question, but it sits under Shiro’s skin and festers, annoying him like a buzzing mosquito. He ignores Keith in favor of doing one of his favorite breathing exercises, trying to feel the breath move through his whole body and carry his tension and stress far away from him.

It doesn’t work.

Keith’s hand sneaks out and lands on Shiro’s knee. “Hey,” he says softly, “talk to me.”

Shiro exhales shakily. Keith’s touch is deeply familial and unobtrusive, but it’s still a change to their relationship—not as exciting as Keith petting his fingers through Shiro’s hair, certainly, but it isn’t just for show. This is Keith comforting Shiro in a new way, a more intimate way, and not just their normal affectionate shoulder-grab. 

“It’s just . . . there’s a lot,” Shiro finally says. He shakes his head and tries to ignore Keith squeezing his knee gently in encouragement. “The whole family thing and the immigration thing and just—everything.”

“And you’re scared of commercial spaceflight,” Keith adds.

“Not scared,” Shiro says firmly, maybe too quick to be convincing, but Keith lets him continue. “I just thought we would be flying ourselves.”

“We could have rented a ship,” Keith says, shrugging. “But honestly it’ll be nice to take a break from flying while we’re on vacation.”

“Keith, you love flying.  _ I  _ love flying.”

“And I’ve logged almost 70 flight hours in the last month while teaching a full course-load,” Keith says patiently. “You’ve logged nearly 160 hours. It’s okay to take a break sometimes, even when you love something.”

Shiro frowns. He can’t even count the number of times he’s said that to Keith over the years they’ve known each other. It feels like a trump card, like Keith’s been planning this for longer than Shiro knows, and the way he looks at Shiro right now says that he doesn’t care at all if Shiro figures that out. It’s obnoxious and manipulative and—

And exactly what Shiro would do if he was worried about Keith over-exerting himself

“That’s supposed to be my line,” Shiro finally says, resigned to losing this argument. “This is different, though, it would have been a road trip.”

“It’s still a road trip,” Keith points out. “Except we don’t have to worry about sleeping in shifts during a twenty-three-hour flight.”

Shiro knows Keith is right. Between the shuttle to this spaceport and the two flights ahead that will take them to the planet Kosimah where Keith’s family lives, it isn’t exactly an easy travel day. Still, this is not Shiro’s idea of fun.

“Scoot over,” Keith says. He pushes Shiro’s shoulder until Shiro is pressed up against the far side of the bench. Keith grabs Shiro’s right arm and puts it on top of the backrest so he can resettle himself up against Shiro’s side, legs swung back up onto the seat. He holds his datapad out so they can both see it. “Watch this video,” he says, “and stop freaking out.”

Shiro swallows, his heart caught up in every place Keith is touching him. “W-what are we watching?” he asks, praying the stutter of his hoarse voice comes across as any other kind of emotion.

“Dog videos. Look.”

But when Shiro looks, he sees a six-legged blue creature with long floppy ears. “That isn’t a dog,” he says.

“It’s basically a dog,” Keith says dismissively. “It plays fetch and can’t talk, see?”

Shiro watches the definitely-not-a-dog chase down a stick, nearly bowling itself over in excitement to drag it back to its owner. The ears on its head flap behind it as it runs back to the camera, tittering laughter coming from the datapad’s speakers.

“Okay,” Shiro says, “I guess that’s kind of a cute dog.”

“Exactly,” Keith says, craning his neck at an unnatural angle to smile up at Shiro. "You like dogs, right?"

"I guess," Shiro says. He doesn’t have much experience with dogs.

"Good," Keith murmurs, eyes sparkling. Or maybe that’s just Shiro’s bias; everything about Keith shines in Shiro’s view. 

Keith puts on another video, this one of a completely different alien creature that Shiro has never seen before. Maybe he needs to spend more time on SpaceTube.

Shiro tries to tell himself that what they're doing isn't cuddling. But Keith doesn’t wait ten minutes before sitting up and rearranging Shiro so he's wedged into the corner of the bench with a travel pillow behind him to soften his seat. Keith leans against him, satisfied, but this time his back rests against Shiro's torso, head just low enough that Shiro could turn and set his chin on top of Keith's hair.

He's so close. The scent of his hair makes Shiro’s heart race.

***

The first thing Shiro says when they reach their seats is, “I’ll survive.”

He means it.

Every possible sitting position leaves his knees jammed up against the seat in front of him, but it’s fine. Shiro has been tall his whole life and the semi-permanent bruises on his knees are proof of that. He tries not to look miserable, but Keith apologizes three times during the preflight checks for not paying an exorbitant amount of money to get them roomier seats.

Keith shifts around to try and make more room for Shiro's legs. "I'll upgrade our tickets when we come back. You shouldn't have to—"

"Keith," Shiro interrupts. "I promise, it's fine."

Keith does not stand down, though. He scowls at Shiro and says, “It’s  _ not  _ fine. I’m your fiance now, you have to let me fix it.”

Shiro’s mouth parts on a soft gasp at the unexpected declaration.

“Now be quiet,” Keith says, turning his head to face front. “They’re going over the safety protocols. I want to hear them.”

But something about the blush sitting high on Keith’s cheek tells Shiro that Keith doesn’t care much about the flight attendants acting out emergency landing procedures at all.

***

They crack open their homework after a monumentally unsatisfying dinner of prepared food goo packets, served cordially to them with a choice of beverage.

The list of potential questions immigration could ask them swims before Shiro on the screen of his datapad. He scrolls, then keeps scrolling, and before his very eyes, the screen refuses to stop scrolling. The end of the list takes a very long time to come.

“Keith,” Shiro says weakly, “there are almost five hundred questions on this list.”

“Shit,” Keith breathes. He leans deep into Shiro’s space to see the proof for himself, and his sigh in response is so loud.

Shiro takes them back to the top and tries to approach this reasonably. A lot of the questions are easy because they nothing to do with romance or dating; it wouldn’t take a lie to answer them.  _ How did you meet? How long have you known each other?  _ But it doesn’t stay easy—the list asks for future family plans, names of bridesmaids and groomsmen for their wedding, how many family members your partner has and what their names are. 

Sure, Shiro knows everything about Keith's career history because they lived that together, but Shiro doesn’t know how to approach the more, uh, personal questions. _What side of the bed does your partner sleep on?_ _Does your partner have any hidden distinguishing marks or tattoos? How often are you and your partner intimate? _

Shiro swallows hard. Anxiety fills him again like air in a balloon.

"That's not too bad," Keith says after a long moment. His leans back but his shoulder remains pressed to Shiro's. "Right?"

"Right," Shiro says, unconvinced.

"We'll have to pick an anniversary," Keith says, half to himself. "But we know each other pretty well, most of it should be easy."

"Do you think that’s enough, though?" Shiro asks. "I mean, I don't—we've never talked about kids, or—"

"You’ve thought about kids," Keith says, easily, as if he and Shiro chat about having children all the time. "But only if you had a partner who really wanted them. I don’t, for the record."

"How do you—"

"And you don't attend any regular worship services," Keith says. He leans into Shiro’s space so he can scroll through the list and tick off answers as he goes. "But you do like to go visit a shrine for luck before you leave for long missions. It reminds you of your grandparents."

Shiro feels breathless. Breathless at how Keith knows him and breathless at the feeling of being so  _ seen,  _ the way Keith doesn't even hesitate. He names Shiro's biggest guilty pleasure food—ketchup flavored potato chips, the spicy kind—and his favorite brand of protein powder. "You have a big scar on your left hip," Keith says, "but I don't know—"

He cuts himself off abruptly, and Shiro, unthinking, prompts, "You don't know?"

"Um. I don't know how far, uh, down it goes."

Redness creeps across Keith's cheeks as he says it, gaze fixed on the datapad, steadfast. Shiro stares and doesn't know what to say, can't get his brain to do more than trace the slope of Keith’s nose in profile, the slight part of his lips.

_ How far down it goes. _

Shiro swallows and tears his eyes away. "Uh, it's—it ends here," Shiro says, shifting so he can point to a spot about halfway down his thigh on the outer edge. It's a pretty innocuous place but Keith only glances at it and nods quickly. He bites his lip, considering something, and Shiro waits for him to decide on what he wants to say.

“Um,” Keith says, staring hard at the datapad. “I have a—a mole on my thigh. The left one.”

Shiro’s voice cracks. “Oh?”

“Yeah, it’s sort of . . . .” Keith moves a leg to open up his lap and tap right over the seam of his pants. Shiro’s mouth goes dry. It’s  _ that  _ part of his thigh, then. “It’s kind of obvious when, uh, yeah.”

“Right,” Shiro says. He very purposefully removes his gaze away from Keith’s thighs and focuses them on the datapad, trying to make the words make sense. Keith has legs. That’s not a big deal or a revelation—he’s always had them. They’re long, muscular, adorned with cute moles, and could probably crush a man’s head.

It’s very hot in here, all of a sudden.

Shiro cannot spend his time imagining a scenario where his head is between Keith’s thighs, getting up close and personal with that mole. He has to pinch the back of his knee. Now is not the time.

“Pet names,” Keith says quickly. “That’s the next question.” Shiro has to spend a moment stringing enough brain cells back together that he understands.

“I like pet names,” Shiro mutters.

“I know.” Keith’s words fall like a mallet. “I mean—I remember when you were dating, uh—”

“Oh god,” Shiro says, panicked.

“Yeah. You—you called him . . . .”

“Don’t say it!”

The strange tension hangs in the air for another moment, and then Keith breaks, collapsing inward with shaking shoulders as he laughs. “Bunny,” he cackles, “you called him  _ bunny, _ what the hell was that?”

A smile crawls over Shiro’s face, and he turns his head away from Keith in to hide it. “It was cute at the time,” he says, only half-serious.

“Was it?” Keith snorts. 

Shiro shakes his head and drops it back against his seat. “Shut up,” he says. “It’s not like I would ever call  _ you _ that.”

“Oh yeah, bunny?” Keith knocks his shoulder into Shiro’s. “What would you call me?”

There are a million ways to answer that question—Shiro would call Keith anything, probably, and no matter how ridiculous it was, he wouldn’t feel a single flush of embarrassment over it.  _ Sweetheart  _ is the first thing that pops into his head, but he holds that one back. It’s too vulnerable. Too soft.

“Baby,” Shiro says, and it doesn’t come out with the jovial, challenging tone he intended. “That’s what I would call you.”

“Pretty basic, don’t you think?” Keith says. He catches Shiro’s eye and holds him there, his gem-like eyes gleaming strangely in the yellowish lights of the cabin. Shiro is struck by how handsome he is, even here: Keith’s bangs hang loosely around his face, his messy braid slung carelessly to the side over his hoodie. No one should be able to pull this look off and make it look stunning, but the ink of Keith’s eyelashes and the faded scar on his cheek lend him an authenticity that makes Shiro want to capture stars in his palms for him.

“It’s classic,” Shiro says softly. 

Keith tilts his head to the right. His mouth is at the perfect angle for Shiro to lean in and capture his lips, but that’s not appropriate here. “I like it,” Keith decides. Shiro’s heart thumps hard in his throat. “Baby.”

Shiro is absolutely not strong enough for this. He forces himself to smile and laugh encouragingly—they’re supposed to be getting married, he needs to be okay with Keith affectionately calling him  _ baby _ right this second. But it’s so difficult. Shiro wants to stick his head out of the airlock and scream at the universe for giving him this only in part.

“Sounds like we’re gonna be just fine,” Shiro says. It comes out too quiet, but Keith doesn’t call him out on it.

“We can do this.” Keith’s mouth sets into a determined line. 

They can do this.

***

They make it through all the questions eventually, noting down answers for each other to study up on. Once it’s done, Keith puts his earphones in and closes his eyes, looking utterly content.

If Shiro closed his eyes, he wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about the ship’s tremors around them and the hum of engines and creaking of metal. It sets his teeth on edge and he has to remind himself that everything is fine and their captain is perfectly competent enough to do the job they were assigned here today.

Shockingly, though, that does nothing to comfort him.

The other little annoyances start to stack up. Dinner was just an hour ago, but that doesn’t stop the Galtranx across the aisle from continually extracting whole peanuts from their pocket and crushing the shells in their bare hands to get at the nuts inside. Bits of shell fall to the ground to join their fallen comrades and Shiro cringes away from the overpowering smell of peanuts, silently apologizing to the poor worker who will have to clean up that mess at the end of the flight.

A group of teenagers sits two rows ahead, rowdy and excited. Shiro imagines they’re on a school trip to a new galaxy and tries to dredge up his childhood feelings of excitement, but he can only resent them for the endless, crinkly bags of food goo flavored Doritos they’re passing back and forth. 

Shiro checks the time. Only thirteen more hours to go until they reach Thaldycon Station.

***

They do not reach Thaldycon Station in thirteen hours. There is, unfortunately, a herd of space whales traveling through the area and apparently it’s faster to just let them get out of the path of the ship.

***

“We missed our connection,” Keith sighs, staring at the board of flights. It’s all in Standard Galran and Shiro can’t read a word of it, but he sighs and offers to take Keith’s small suitcase from him while he goes up to the customer service desk to wrangle their way onto the next available flight.

It doesn’t leave for another two hours, but it’s a flight.

***

The tiny interplanetary transit ship touches down on the planet Kosimah with a lurch that shocks Shiro out of his pathetic attempt at napping while sitting upright. They’re five hours later than originally anticipated. Plus, their current ship smells inexplicably like the little bags of herbs Shiro’s grandmother kept in the bathrooms of their house, and it’s nauseating combined with the general mass of beings crammed in with it.

The ship shakes as its engines rumble slowly to  _ off. _ Shiro can’t for the life of him imagine ever having to fly one of these old, rickety ships, but it would be better than being a passenger. These ships don’t have the diagnostics systems like the new ones do, and he fears what would happen if the wrong screw were to come loose. 

A nightmare.

He feels Keith shuffle next to him, leaning down to pull his backpack out from under his feet. Shiro should probably get his, too, and quit pretending to be non-responsive.

He pushes the sleep mask up to his forehead and blinks exhaustion out of his bleary eyes.

"Morning, sleeping beauty," Keith says in a low voice. There’s a twist of a smile in his voice and Shiro can’t even resent him for it, especially when he drops the  _ g  _ in morning and Shiro’s stomach flips at the rare hint of a twang. “You alright?”

Shiro scrubs at his eyes. He’s always more vulnerable around Keith when he’s tired, soft and guardless. "Yeah," he says, unsure of his answer even as it comes out of his mouth. It's hard to tell if the nap actually helped at all or if it just made him even more exhausted in the end; the constant bouncing of the ship certainly didn’t help and neither does the way Keith looks at him. Shiro smacks his lips together to clear the taste of sleep from his mouth as passengers stand all around them, gathering their things out of the overhead bins.

"Here," Keith says. His backpack nudges Shiro's arm. "I'll grab our suitcases if you get these."

"Um. Sure." How long has Shiro been awake for while making this trip, exactly? He's gone for longer stretches in his life, but at this rate, the first impression Shiro makes on Keith’s extended family is going to be that of a half-asleep, babbling fool. It will not be excellent.

While Shiro has his crisis, Keith muscles down their suitcases from the overhead bins. Watching him, Shiro forgets himself for a moment and he can't help but trace his eyes over the tiny strip of skin that appears under the hem of Keith's T-shirt as his arms stretch over his head. Shiro's always been weak to that particular sight—it has an easy sensuality to it, and Keith, in particular, embodies it like no man Shiro has ever known.

But that's hardly important. Shiro is just tired and not thinking straight in any sense of the word, so he returns his gaze to the seat in front of him.

Keith handles the suitcases admirably, even though the aisle is hardly wide enough for Shiro to walk through. Both backpacks in hand, Shiro follows him out of the ship once the way finally clears, and at the door, he's hit with his first breath of fresh air in what feels like years. The ship lets out right onto the tarmac, and the air is sweet-smelling, clean, and much cooler than he expected. Underneath an overcast sky, spindly orange trees surround them on three sides, the fourth a single-story, rust-red building with a crowd standing in front of it, waving at the new arrivals.

Shiro shuffles the backpacks, slinging one onto his shoulder and holding the lighter one in his hand. Keith waits for him to stop looking around, a faint smile on his lips as he tugs his hoodie back on to ward off the chilly air.

"Ready?" he asks, unable to hide his clear excitement.

"As I'll ever be," Shiro says, smiling back at him. His vision swims for a second but it clears when he blinks. He needs a bed as soon as he can possibly get it, but they can't be far from Keith's home. He can crash first thing and meet the family later.

Keith leads the way to the crowd, walking confidently forward. He’s set on a path—it takes Shiro a moment to spot her, but that's undeniably Keith's mom.

Krolia looks every inch the mother of her son: even though her skin is purple, it’s impossible to miss the family resemblance. Shiro recognizes that nose, the set of her mouth, and the proud way she carries her shoulders. That might even be a knife sheath on her hip, which is hilarious because Keith brought  _ his _ favorite knife on this trip even though it was a pain to get through security. Just looking at her, Shiro can feel himself standing up straighter. He knows a lot of cadets who look at Keith and do the same.

Keith breaks into a run as they approach. Krolia throws her arms open, a big grin reminiscent of Keith's spread wide across her face, and Keith throws his arms around her and holds on tight. Shiro's heart clenches at the sight—it makes him happy to see Keith so excited to see his family, and it quells the nerves for a moment. Anyone who loves Keith that much is someone Shiro is very certain he can get along with easily.

The nerves return immediately, though, when a very,  _ very _ large Galra man leans in close and wraps his arms around Keith and Krolia together.

Oh, god.

Shiro steps up to them just as Keith starts to pull away from the hug. He drops the backpacks next to the suitcases Keith abandoned and goes to brush his bangs out of his face, but he finds the sleeping mask still sitting on his forehead. Embarrassing, and all in front of Keith’s mom and the largest Galra Shiro has ever seen. Shiro is unashamed to be a little scared of them both.

“So,” says the large Galra, “where's your boy?”

"He's—" Keith turns, searching out Shiro, and he beckons Shiro in. "This is Shiro. Shiro, this is my mom and Thace, my uncle."

"Mmm," Thace the uncle says, scanning Shiro up and down in consideration, "maybe the word  _ boy _ is inappropriate."

Shiro blinks.

“Hi,” he says. He can feel the cursed blush crawling up his face. “Uh, hello, I’m Shiro. It’s nice to meet you both.”

“Shiro,” Krolia says warmly. She touches her fist to her heart in greeting in concert with Thace and Shiro matches them; Keith schooled him on basic customs before they left Earth, and Shiro’s movement is clumsy but it makes Krolia smile all the same. “I am very pleased to finally meet you. I have heard much about you from Keith and I look forward to making your husbandship.”

Shiro isn’t quite sure what to say to that one, but Keith steps in. “That doesn’t come through,” he says softly, like he’s used to it.

“Ah.” Krolia readjusts her phrasing. “I look forward to welcoming you into our family for this weekend, Shiro. I have heard much about you from Keith.”

“Thank you,” Shiro says sincerely. Keith smiles brightly at him and Shiro feels like he’s done something right.

“The translator messes up sometimes with the local dialects,” Keith explains, turning to pick up their suitcases again. Shiro moves to follow, but Thace snatches up all the luggage before he can blink. “Thace, I can—”

“Hush, you have had a long journey,” Thace says. “Your friend Shiro looks as if he will fall asleep as soon as we let him close his eyes.”

That pretty much sums up how Shiro feels at the moment.

"Well," Krolia says, hands on her hips. She looks between Shiro and Keith, and Shiro abruptly realizes something: she’s tall enough to be level with Shiro’s gaze, a full six foot four inches. Shiro’s respect turns again to fear. "I am excited to get to know you, Shiro."

Before he knows it, Shiro is drawn into a strong hug, her muscular arms wrapping tight around his shoulders. Shiro sinks into it in surprise, not quite sure what to do with himself. It's his understanding that hugging isn't necessarily a Galra _thing, _especially with strangers, but maybe he was misinformed somewhere along the way about that. After all, Keith didn't have time to teach him everything.

When Krolia releases him, she steps back and offers a small smile. Shiro smiles back and tries not to betray his uncertainty.

"Our vehicle is this way," Thace says. He steps towards the little building and leads the way inside, snaking past departures and a tiny food stand selling Sal's Fast Food and more energy drinks than Shiro is comfortable knowing exist.

They end up in a new model hover cruiser. It's a nice ride, far too expensive for Shiro to do more than lust over pictures of, and Shiro can't resist flicking his eyebrows in Keith's direction to indicate disbelief and excitement. The corner of Keith's mouth twitches in response as they pile into the back together. The cruiser, blessedly, is made for beings much, much taller than Shiro, and he has the incredible experience of his knees not banging up against the seat in front of him when he sits. Krolia takes the driver’s seat, guiding them expertly out of the lot as the soft sounds of what Shiro mentally labels  _ Galran jazz _ plays in the background.

"So Shiro," Thace says pleasantly, turning in the passenger seat to face them. Well, Shiro guesses his tone is pleasant. "I hear you're from Earth's moon. What was it like growing up in such a tiny colony?"

"Um," Shiro says. A  _ colony?  _ He has to repress his indignation, reminding himself again that he can’t expect every being he meets to know the political history of Shiro’s home planet. Colony is a touchy word where he comes from. "It was great. There's a good school system there, and the community I grew up in was very close."

"It's not a colony," Keith informs Thace.

"Really?" Thace's face shifts for a moment—is that him looking mildly impressed or is he mad at Keith for interrupting? Shiro needs to work on reading Galra facial expressions. So far, he's been able to figure out exactly nothing.

"Good for them," Krolia adds. "A strong national character is a boon to any community."

What the fuck.

"Excellent point," Thace agrees, and that seems to be the end of that topic.

Shiro shifts his attention to looking outside the window at the passing scenery. They're moving through what looks to be a small city, every house along the street just as short and squat looking as the spaceport building. Everything is done in shades of purple, red, and black, an overall aesthetic that Shiro supports but doesn't quite know how to take in. He had imagined Keith's family living somewhere much more modern and popular than this place seems to be. There's little landscaping other than the neatly trimmed grass, which is a deep color that Shiro can't decide if it trends more toward blue or green, and it clashes violently with the occasional orange tree.

It's a striking place. He doesn't quite know what to make of it.

The road widens from two to four lanes and the character of the buildings change. Storefront windows emerge and there are signs in Galran script hanging above doorways.

"Welcome to the city of Marmora, Shiro," Krolia says pleasantly. "That large building there is the Marmora General Store, if you need anything while you are here that our family cannot help you with. We have local range communications on the estate, but intergalactic comms can be found at a number of locations in the city, should you need to contact anyone back on Earth."

"Sure," Shiro says; Keith warned him about the difficulty of remote communications. Something clicks in his brain. "Wait a minute, you said—the town is called Marmora?"

"The city, yes."

Shiro casts a sidelong glance at Keith, who very pointedly does not meet Shiro’s eyes. A blush sits on the high points of his cheeks and it's that detail alone that makes Shiro certain he hasn't missed anything at all.

"Keith didn't tell me his family name was the same as the town's," Shiro says, trying to keep it casual. The glare Keith gives him indicates that he was anything but.

"It's not important," Keith says, half to himself.

"Our family founded the settlement on Kosimah, many generations back, during the time of the Emperor Zarkon," Thace says, oblivious to the sudden tension in the back of the car. "This architectural style was quite popular in elite circles back then, but I believe the young people call it vintage now.” Thace laughs to himself, deep and hearty, and he grins at Shiro as if to let him in on the joke. “We have had good luck with the planet—its climate is well suited for many classic Galra crops and it serves as an excellent place for people to lead a quiet life. Our family has prospered here.”

"Oh," Shiro wheezes. Settling a planet—even one as in the middle of nowhere as this—is no small feat, and is rarely taken up by average people. "I didn't—I hadn't realized. Keith never mentioned . . . ."

"It's not a big deal," Keith maintains.

Shiro looks at him like he's lost it. "Keith. Your family founded a planet. They  _ own  _ a planet."

"We do," Krolia says pleasantly. "Several, in fact, if you include the extended relatives."

The extended relatives. Of course.

Shiro quiets down again, sitting in his disbelief as he stares out the window and tries to imagine what the heck Keith's family  _ does  _ to have the money and resources to build something like this. Or did. He doesn't think that Keith ever told him exactly what it is his mom does—intelligence, he admitted years ago, half under his breath, and then immediately swore Shiro to secrecy. He doesn't think it's a good time to bring that up to Keith's mom and uncle.

He has so many questions, but Shiro is so exhausted at this point that he can’t do much more than shoot Keith a confused look and make a mental note to grill him about this later. If nothing else, Shiro is going to need to know more about what’s happening here so he can actually sound like part of the family when he goes through his immigration interview. 

He wants to hold Keith's hand but it's totally not necessary right now to do that. Keith certainly didn't ask him to.

"We are home," Thace says, an indeterminable amount of time later. 

Shiro’s eyes blink open as the hovercraft turns off the main road onto a forested driveway, surrounded by red-orange foliage and that same dark underbrush. Rounding a corner, the house appears suddenly. It looks far more normal than Shiro had expected—the siding is dark brown around large windows tinted dark, and it blends in well with the surrounding foliage. The large windows reflect the bright blue sky coming into view as the clouds clear up. There’s a shimmering lake off to the right and craggy mountain peaks in the distance, so breathtakingly beautiful that Shiro can’t stop staring. 

He remains entranced as the hovercraft pulls up to a stop, still a fair distance from the house, and the four of them pile out. Shiro marvels at the landscape—this whole place is like nothing he expected. 

Keith pulls their bags out of the trunk, hefting a suitcase and a backpack in each arm. Shiro’s brain experiences heat death for a moment, either from exhaustion or from thinking about what else Keith could pick up so easily. 

“Keith!” a voice yells from the house where a whole group of Galra is waiting. “Welcome home!”

“Mom, what’s going on?” Keith asks.

Krolia smiles at him and takes both suitcases from him. “Nothing,” she says, “just a little welcoming party.”

“It is only fifty of our closest friends and neighbors,” Thace says, standing behind Krolia with his hand on her shoulders. “They are all very excited to meet you, Shiro. I hope you will allow them to welcome you.”

Shiro shoots Keith a panicked look as soon as Krolia and Thace’s backs are turned, but Keith looks resigned. “They’re . . . enthusiastic,” he admits softly so only Shiro can hear. “Are you okay for this? If you’re too tired I can—”

“It’s fine,” Shiro says, even though privately he wishes he could just die on the spot. He looks Keith in the eye and nods to steel himself. “Are you ready?”

Keith smiles gently and reaches across the space between them to take Shiro’s hand in his. Shiro’s hand twitches as he accepts it. “We can do this,” he says firmly. His raspy, low voice curls around Shiro’s heart and settles deep in his chest. “I won’t leave your side.”

***

Shiro believes that Keith meant that promise, but still, it doesn’t take twenty minutes inside the house for him to find himself all alone and panicking. Shiro is lost. So very, very lost, and he knows that really the house can’t be quite as big as it feels, but it’s nonetheless intimidating. Shiro knows not  _ every _ Galra is approaching or exceeding seven feet tall in height but he’s hemmed in by so many and nearly trapped by them in this corner of the kitchen that Shiro may as well not be able to see the few aliens who are around his own height or shorter.

Where did Keith go and can he please come back?

Tentatively, Shiro takes a few steps out from his corner. No one notices him—or he doesn’t think so, because it’s hard to read the face of the large Galra wearing a mask across the room, even when they’re directly facing Shiro. He cranes his neck to try and spot Keith, convinced he can’t have gotten far. The house is a limited space. There are  _ only _ about fifty people here. 

He leans around a giant Galra with feathers poking out of the top of their head. Clearly, Keith is far from the only half or part Galra around here, but he’s the most human-looking one Shiro has seen.

Shiro is a decorated officer who should be able to find his distinctive-looking friend in a room full of aliens, but he’s an exhausted decorated officer too. What a day.

A very large, broad chest steps into Shiro’s vision. It takes him a moment to realize he needs to look up to find the head attached to it. The Galra’s face is strong and harshly lined, accentuated by the long white braid of hair slung over his shoulder. 

“Hello,” Shiro says.

“You are Shiro,” the Galra says. “I am Kolivan.”

Shiro knows that name—one of Keith’s uncles, biologically related but distantly. Keith has spoken very highly of him in the past, almost as close to Kolivan as he is to his mother, and so Shiro straightens his back and squares his shoulders. He needs to make a good impression.

“Keith has told me a lot about you,” Shiro says. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Yes.” Kolivan stares down at him. His face isn’t  _ just  _ unreadable—as far as Shiro can tell, there’s absolutely zero expression to be read at all. “And you to me. Takashi Shirogane, rank Captain, born to a prominent family on your moon, friend of Olkarion, and dedicated friend. You are an impressive man.”

“Oh,” Shiro says. He doesn’t think he can respond in turn with all of those facts; Keith really  _ has _ been talking to his family about Shiro.

“Have a drink,” Kolivan says. Without breaking Shiro’s eye contact, he plucks two glasses from a tray of drinks going around and presses on into Shiro’s hands. It’s light blue in color and Shiro doesn’t dare ask what’s in it. “You are a hopeful for the Garrison mission to Thayserix.”

“Uh, yes,” Shiro says. Does Kolivan ever ask questions? “I applied for command, on the recommendation of my superiors.” He smiles, tries to cut the tension. “It’s a dream mission for me, I’ve always wanted to explore the universe.”

“Keith applied as well,” Kolivan says, his tone more clipped than before. “To be a pilot. To be  _ your  _ pilot.”

Shiro starts to get the feeling that he’s stepped in something he shouldn’t have. “Keith loves to fly,” he says slowly. “He hates the whole—Garrison hierarchy thing.”

Kolivan blinks slowly. He takes a sip of his drink and Shiro doesn’t mirror him, fearful of how hard his hand is shaking. “His family worries for him,” Kolivan says. “We may not have known him long, but he is a capable warrior. He would do well, here, if he were to take his place among us.”

Whatever that means, Shiro decides then that he needs an exit strategy from this conversation. He glances to the side, but there’s no one paying them any attention. Shiro scrambles for an answer.

“His—his place?” he asks, playing along until he can make his excuses. Kolivan’s broad frame blocks most of the room from Shiro and he  _ still _ can’t find Keith anywhere.

“As the first son of—”

“Hello.”

The loud voice startles Shiro so bad that the drink in his hands slops from the glass and all over his fingers. His hand is going to be disgustingly sticky, but he can’t be mad at the person saving him from whatever this interaction with Kolivan is becoming. He turns desperately to this new person. They have pale blue-purple skin and hair cut in a sharp bob, features remarkably familiar.

"I am Acxa," they say, laying a fist across their chest in greeting. Shiro matches the movement. "You are Keith's friend?"

"Yes,” Shiro says, head bobbing. He glances nervously at Kolivan who is now simply glaring him down like he thinks he can smite Shiro with his gaze. Or maybe Shiro is projecting that. “Are you, uh, a relative of Keith’s?”

“A cousin,” Acxa answers. “Kolivan, I believe Regris was asking for you in the study.”

Kolivan is silent for a long minute while Shiro just stands there like a living statue, incapable of twitching a single limb.

“Farewell, Shiro,” Kolivan says eventually. “I will make your husbandship at a later date.”

It’s the same mistranslation as earlier, Shiro notes, but the thought is immediately washed away by the relief of Kolivan slipping away into the crowd before Shiro can respond to him. Acxa’s face gives nothing away and they stare just as much as Kolivan did. It  _ feels _ friendlier, at least. “I didn't realize there would be so many people here,” Shiro says, scrambling for a topic to present his rescuer with. They seem alright so far, and Shiro would like not to be abandoned again.

Acxa smiles secretively, chin tipping up a fraction. They aren't that much shorter than Shiro but the movement is oddly intimidating. He needs Keith to come back and translate all of his family’s weird looks because Shiro can’t go on like this for very much longer.

"Keith doesn't come home often," Acxa says. "As Krolia's only child, it is an event when he does. The whole family had to come out to see him and his human friend. You are a novelty."

Shiro laughs, startled, and he says, "Do you get many humans out this way?"

"Mm, no. I believe you are the first human to step foot on Kosimah."

"Wow." 

Acxa inclines their head."We are far from Earth. But still you came."

"I've wanted to meet Keith's family for a long time," Shiro confesses. "You're all very important to him even though he hasn't known you for very long."

Acxa hums quietly, intense gaze breaking away from Shiro to survey the rest of the party. It isn't quiet in the house by any means, but it’s not so loud that Shiro and Acxa can’t hear each other over the din. The atmosphere reminds Shiro of a dinner party, though much louder and larger. Shiro takes his first sip of the drink in his hand—it tastes a bit like mangoes and mint, gently fruity with an undercurrent of spice that he can't identify, and he immediately goes back to the glass for more. 

"How many of those have you had?" Acxa asks, eyeing the drink.

"Only this," Shiro answers. "It's very good." 

"Indeed," Acxa agrees, "but I recommend you only have—" 

An uproarious cheer from the next room interrupts Acxa, so loud that Shiro cringes away from it. They turn to the noise, curious, but it’s impossible to tell when has the crowd so riled up. Shiro takes another drink and contemplates stepping back into the corner he occupied earlier; it’s out of the way and just hidden enough that he might be able to sit on the floor and doze for a few moments, since Keith is nowhere to be found anyway. Shiro really can’t handle all of this social interaction right now.

_ "SHIRO!" _

His name comes roared across the house by a voice he doesn't know. Shiro’s heart jumps into his throat—did something happen? Did they find out about his and Keith's lies? Is Shiro now the target of fifty angry relatives who would do anything to protect one of their beloved children? It was probably Kolivan, actually, because he seems to not like Shiro. 

But a huge hand shoots out from behind Shiro and lands on his shoulder before he can figure any of that out. "There you are," the owner says, "you must go to Keith!"

Shiro is shoved forward into a throng of Galra who cheer and grin toothily at him. Someone clinks the rim of a glass against Shiro’s own and, uncertain, Shiro throws back the rest of his drink to meet what he’s pretty sure is a toast. It makes at least five Galra shout and down their drinks like a shot, so maybe he did alright.

The cup disappears from his hand as the throng of bodies parts into a hallway for him. He follows the path, doing his best to acknowledge every arm he sees crossed over someone’s chest in greeting. Wherever they’re guiding him, this seems far too friendly to be the lead up to a huge explosive fight over Shiro entering their home and lying to all of them about his relationship to Keith, so maybe . . . maybe it’s going to be alright. 

Shiro’s eyes are so tired that when he finally notices Keith, he sees a halo of light behind his head.

Shiro stumbles toward him, the scant distance between them stretching out for years, and when he finally reaches Keith, he finds both of his hands entwined with Keith's. Security rocks through Shiro, almost deafening, and he falls into the pleading, apologetic look Keith gives him.

The cat's out of the bag, Shiro supposes. Keith dropped the engagement bomb.

"Hi," Keith says, and the buzz around them drops to nothing in Shiro's ears. Even exhausted and worn from almost two days of travel, he's so beautiful to Shiro. 

"What's going on?" Shiro asks. He tries to keep his voice down, but Krolia is the one who answers.

"My son brings news!" she cries, thrusting her drink high up in the air. Shiro recognizes the color of it and wishes he had another because Kolivan is standing right behind her, staring at Shiro. A cheer meets her words. "Keith, speak."

Shocking silence falls immediately as all eyes land on Shiro and Keith in the center of the room. Shiro sweats and tries not to look anyone in the eyes, which isn’t very hard because he’s having trouble focusing his gaze on anything farther away than Keith’s face right now. It must be a problem with his contacts

“Heh, hi, everyone,” Keith says. “This is Shiro.”

“Hi,” Shiro says weakly.

Keith licks his lips and glances sideways at Shiro. This is it—this, more than anything, is the moment they can never come back from. Lying to the government is a form of rebellion that Shiro can justify; lying to Keith’s only family, the people he’s worked so hard to trust after finding them again after so long—well, that’s a very different situation. 

“Shiro is my fiance,” Keith says, stepping closer to Shiro’s side. “I hope you will welcome him as you once did me.”

The cheering starts up again as soon as the words are out of Keith’s mouth, so loud it makes Shiro dizzy. Keith squeezes both of Shiro's hands, his touch grounding, and Shiro forces an excited smile onto his face as he looks out over Keith's relatives. The joy in the air is clear, and giddiness wars in his gut with guilt. A primal part of him hears Keith saying those words— _ Shiro is my fiance _ —and roars in triumphant exaltation. He's on top of the world.

And then Krolia surges forward to throw her arms around both of them, squeezing so hard that Shiro's back cracks from the pressure. He doesn't get a chance to let go of Keith's hand to hug her back.

Krolia pulls back and the sheer, unabashed delight in her eyes is unmistakable. "Tell us the story," she says, practically bouncing on her feet. "How did you become engaged?"

It’s a reasonable question from a parent, and Shiro opens his mouth to answer. He and Keith spent some time on the ship here sketching out a timeline of their relationship and engagement, and he feels confident in his ability to pull off making up a coherent story. 

Apparently, though, Keith has other plans.

"We can't," Keith blurts out. All eyes, including Shiro's, turn to him and the excited murmurs from Keith's family fade to silence. Shiro doesn't know what to say. He opens his mouth to try to help, but Keith's hands squeeze once in warning. "That's a very private thing for most humans," Keith explains. He's pulling that out of his ass and Shiro can't help his raised eyebrow. "I don't want to—to disrespect Shiro, or anything."

"I did not know this," Krolia says. Her shoulders deflate. "On Earth you do not share your glory?"

"It's okay," Shiro interjects. His desire to please kicks in something fierce—he can’t disappoint his  _ mother-in-law. _ "I'm okay with, uh, sharing the glory. It wasn't a big deal, anyway."

"Shiro," Keith hisses, but Shiro just smiles and pulls him close to reassure him. Sliding an arm around Keith's waist, Shiro holds him tight, like he thinks a newly engaged couple should, and he says the first thing that comes to his mind.

"We were out in the desert," Shiro starts. "We took the hoverbikes out to the place we like to watch the sunset at. When the stars come out you can see the whole galaxy, it's one of my favorite places to be." Despite everything, a genuine smile pricks at Shiro's lips—the desert cliff is his and Keith's  _ place, _ no one else's. Shiro doesn't even go there alone, only always with Keith. "We watched the sun go down and I was admiring the way the sky looks just after the sun finally disappears behind the horizon, and I heard Keith say my name from behind me and—"

"And I wanted to know if Shiro needed any more food to eat," Keith says loudly. "Because I had brought dinner."

"Uh, right," Shiro says. "And then—"

"Then I asked Shiro if he was cold." Keith's voice rings out and Shiro catches two approving nods from the onlooking crowd. "Because I had brought blankets, just in case. It can get cold in the desert at night."

"Um. Yeah," Shiro says, trying his best to maintain a neutral face. "But it wasn't night, so it was still pretty warm at that point, right?"

Keith stares out across the sea of his relatives. "I was just being thoughtful."

A niggling thought in the back of Shiro's brain says maybe he needs to stop and reevaluate what the heck is going on with Keith right now, but he doesn't know what he could  _ do _ that would be subtle in front of so many onlookers. Something like performance anxiety kicks in and Shiro just has to go with it—he has to tell this story, to prove to Keith's mom and uncles and aunts and cousins that the two of them really are engaged, that Keith did get down on one knee at sunset, and that Shiro isn’t feeling so dizzy right now that he could faint. They can talk about Keith's weird hangups about feeding Shiro when they  _ aren't _ literally in the middle of a crowd expecting to hear a deeply romantic story about how much Keith and Shiro are dedicated to each other as a couple.

"I wasn't expecting it at all," Shiro says. He hears Keith inhale like he's about to speak and so Shiro steps on his foot, keeping the movement slight so as not to arouse attention. Keith stays silent. "I was still watching the sky and I heard him say my name—my first name—and I turned around, and there he was. On his knee, holding up the ring box." Shiro smiles, lost in the fantasy—not that he's ever before imagined the way Keith might propose to him, or thought about how thoroughly romantic it would be to get engaged at sunset or under the stars. "He asked me to marry him, just like that."

Shiro turns to smile at Keith, expecting relief or pride that Shiro was able to come up with such an excellent story on the spot, but Keith only looks at him with dread.

“Wait,” someone says, and Shiro turns his head but he can't figure out who spoke. "You said  _ yes  _ to that?”

"Of course!" Shiro says, at the same time Keith grits out, "Cultural differences."

“I think it is an excellent story,” Krolia says, but Shiro is not sure that her tone matches her words. “I am deeply happy for you both."

"I agree!" The exclamation comes from Thace, appearing out of nowhere to stand behind Krolia and raise his drink to the ceiling again. "A toast, for the son who brings his mother pride and honor in choosing a life partner. Mabruk sa!”

"Show us a kiss!" a voice yells.

"A kiss from the happy couple!"

This feels like a movie, or maybe Shiro is just woozy. His head feels weird. Krolia and Thace cheer as well, and Shiro swears he sees Acxa out of the corner of his eye, drink raised in a toast. Shiro looks at Keith, still held tight to his side, and finds Keith's eyes shining like twin moons. He feels every inch of their height difference so acutely in that moment, struck by how far he has to tip his head down to look at Keith when he's this close.

Shiro doesn't remember it being like  _ this _ the first time they kissed. He doesn't remember Keith looking like he might want to belong in Shiro's arms.

No. That's not real. Shiro's vision grows hazy as Keith leans up, pressing a soft, slow kiss to Shiro's cheek. It's so, so intimate; Keith breathes out through his nose and air brushes Shiro's skin, marking him in some new way.

Keith pulls away but his eyes never leave Shiro's.

"A  _ real _ kiss, Keith," Thace yells. Shiro's face burns with embarrassment and maybe something else too—the cheering and shouting grow more raucous with every second, but still, he is captivated by Keith. Eyes sparkling and mouth twitching, Keith cocks an eyebrow as if to say,  _ Should we go for it? _ And Shiro is weak, he is so weak.

Dizzy and already breathless, Shiro puts two hands on Keith's waist and hauls him right up against Shiro's body. He tells himself they have to sell this, have to make it convincing for everyone, but as soon as his lips meet Keith's, he completely forgets how to kiss.

It's awkward.

To Shiro, it's so obvious they haven't done this before, not really. One drunken makeout session years ago was not enough for Shiro to learn how Keith likes to be kissed or how to anticipate his movements, and he doesn’t have a single clue if Keith even remembers that it happened at all. Keith turns his head in a way Shiro doesn't expect and their noses collide; Shiro parts his lips to make it deeper, and Keith nips him on the bottom lip.

Shiro shocks away from Keith, breathing far too hard. He doesn't even register Keith's family around them anymore. His whole universe is cut down to no one but Keith, nothing but the press of Keith's body against his.

His vision blacks out for a moment. Shiro shakes his head to clear himself—the kiss was awful. That should discourage him, he thinks, should act as proof that Keith isn't his meant-to-be. But all Shiro can think about is how much he has to learn about Keith, how much he  _ could _ learn if they had the time. If this was a real relationship, Shiro would learn how to kiss Keith exactly the way he likes. He would catalog every whine, whimper, moan, every little way Keith moves when he feels pleasure. Shiro would take care of Keith and show him devoted attention like neither of them have ever known.

"Shiro . . . ." Keith says. Shiro’s heart leaps into his throat and he sways uncontrollably closer. Or maybe he’s just swaying. He should kiss Keith again, convince those relatives around them that they are in  _ love. _ He mashes his mouth against Keith’s but for some reason, it feels more like a nose than a mouth.

“Shiro?” Keith asks.

It's the last thing Shiro hears as his vision goes dark for good.

***

“—should not have planned a party when you arrived.”

“It’s okay, mom.” That’s Keith’s voice, sounding far too tired. “If he doesn’t wake up soon—”

The conversation quiets back down to indiscernible levels and Shiro’s attention fades as he tries to take stock of where he is and what has happened. He has a slight headache and his mouth feels oddly dry. Shiro isn't certain exactly why it happened, but he's fallen unconscious a few times in his life and he knows enough to recognize the feeling now. He lets out a little hum, just loud enough to be heard, and the whisper of conversation around him stops.

"Shiro," Keith says, sounding relieved and guilty all at once.  _ Shiro _ feels guilty for making him worry.

Slowly, Shiro convinces his eyes that they want to open, but it's a process to get them to focus on what's happening above him. Keith and his mom are both leaning over him, Keith's face lined with concern and worry. They have the same pinch of concern between their brows, and the thought makes Shiro grin despite himself.

"Hey," Shiro says hoarsely. "Please tell me I didn't just pass out in front of all your relatives."

"You had a glass of kralalva," Krolia says. "It is well known for its effects among Galra, but we did not warn you. For that I apologize."

"You drugged yourself," Keith says with a sigh.

Yeah, that sounds like something Shiro would do the first time he meets his best friend/fake fiance's family. It's on par with the first time Matt invited him over to his parent's house and Shiro accidentally sliced his thumb open on a knife while cutting up onions. Colleen had calmly driven him to the emergency room for stitches while Sam finished dinner, but Shiro's never quite been able to live it down. Sam still won’t let him cut onions.

"Sorry," Shiro says, and he snorts a little at himself in embarrassment. "How bad was it?"

"Keith caught you," Krolia says. That's definitely a smile at her mouth, though Keith doesn't look nearly as amused. "My son is very strong. I am sure you appreciate that."

"Every day," Shiro answers easily. Maybe too easily, but he's still a little loopy. He reaches out for Keith, open palm begging for Keith to hold his hand, and Keith accepts it with a little sigh. "Hey, babe, I'm okay."

Keith blinks at him, confusion clear as day in his eyes. Shiro tightens his fingers.

“Just promise me you won’t do something like that again,” Keith finally sighs, resigned to his fate. “I don’t like having to save you from cracking your head open because you had too much to drink.”

“Don’t act like you hate saving me,” Shiro teases.

Keith rolls his eyes, a red blush sitting high on his cheeks. He looks annoyed, but the way his thumb rubs back and forth over Shiro’s knuckles speaks of an unknowable affection that makes Shiro’s heartbeat sound off loudly in his ears. Keith stands there, silent, as if reassuring himself that Shiro is alright, and then he seems to shake himself out of whatever trance he fell into. Shiro is patient enough to wait him out.

"We should probably get to bed," Keith says. "I'm sure being so tired didn't help."

"Of course," Krolia says. Her eyes linger on their hands. "I had Antok bring your luggage to your room earlier and it should all be prepared. Allow me to lead you."

Keith helps Shiro to sit up and stand. Shiro doesn't recognize the room they're in—it looks to be something of a living room, with wide windows facing out over the lake, though the rest of the walls are starkly bare. The couch Shiro came to on is essentially little more than a cushioned bench, and he only realizes how uncomfortable it is when he sits up.

They follow Krolia out into the main space the party was in and through the halls of the house, passing more doors than Shiro can count. He doesn't understand how one house can be so huge or who might even live here—it looks as if all fifty people who had attended the welcoming party might very well have all come from the rooms here. All of Keith's relatives under one roof—Shiro can hardly imagine it, and he shudders to think how it would work to maintain a family unit like that.

Krolia takes them down a well-lit hall to a slate gray door. It opens automatically when she waves a hand over a panel on the wall next to the door, a fascinating bit of technology that Shiro will have to ask about tomorrow when he's competent enough to understand the answer. Keith ushers Shiro through the door first, his hands so firm on Shiro's back that he may as well be shoving him. His concern is touching but Shiro doesn't need the overexcited help.

“This will be your bedroom,” Krolia says. “I hope you will find it acceptable.”

Shiro can’t help himself. As soon as he sees the bed, he yawns so wide his jaw cracks unpleasantly. He doesn’t want to take anything else in; it doesn’t even matter where his suitcase and backpack have gotten off to, because all he wants is to finally crawl underneath the covers and lose himself to oblivion. He’s as happy to sleep naked as he is to sleep fully clothed, so long as he gets to  _ sleep. _

He forces back another yawn. “Where’s, um, where’s Keith’s room?” Shiro asks, a hand half-covering his mouth.

The corner of Krolia’s lips twitches. “Worry not, Shiro, I am under no pretense about the depth of your relationship. You and Keith are welcome to this room. This wing of the house is quite private and should provide you with the most comfort.”

Shiro’s cheeks burn as his eyes slide uncontrollably back toward the bed and Keith coughs—right. Of course. The newly engaged couple certainly would want privacy and a bed bigger than anything you can buy on Earth. The room is decorated in muted reds and dark paneling. Shiro hates to say it, but it sort of . . . looks like a room expected to entertain couples having sex. A lot of sex, even. 

“It looks great,” Shiro says faintly. It’s not a lie. It’s just really,  _ really _ hard to stop thinking about him and Keith sharing the honeymoon suite equivalent of Keith’s family’s home.

A voice booms from behind them. “You are spoiling them, Krolia.” Shiro whirls around to find Thace standing in the door, his height dwarfing the doorframe, exceptionally tall as it is. He has what looks like a large, handmade quilt in his arms. “I am glad to see you are feeling better, Shiro. We missed you both for the rest of the party.”

Shiro doesn’t dare ask how long he was out for. He thanks Thace instead and makes a half-hearted joke about learning to handle his drinks, but Thace just waves him off.

“You are hardly the first to be overtaken by such a strong spirit,” Thace says vaguely.

Intending to ask about what exactly it  _ was _ that he drank, Shiro opens his mouth. But he’s cut off by the entrance of something very large, very blue, and very furry that shoulders Shiro out of the way, knocking him into Krolia, and absolutely clobbers Keith, taking him straight to the ground.

It’s a dog, Shiro realizes. The biggest damn dog he’s ever seen, and it is slobbering all over Keith’s laughing face, tail wagging so fast that it blurs.

“Ah,” Krolia says. She carefully nudges Shiro back to balance. “This is Kosmo. Keith’s space wolf.”

“Of course,” Shiro says. Of course Keith has a space wolf twice his own size.

Keith staggers to his feet slowly, petting Kosmo with both hands. He grins at Shiro and says, “This is my wolf. Wolf, this is Shiro.”

“Hi, Kosmo,” Shiro says, tentatively reaching his hand out. Kosmo boops the hand with his nose and ducks his head so Shiro can pet his soft forehead.

“Don’t call him that,” Keith says. “Mom, seriously, I told you not to name him. He’ll tell me—”

“Tell you his name when he is ready, I know,” Krolia says, exasperated. “Keith, you cannot expect him to continue living without a name. He responds well to Kosmo.”

“Ugh,” Keith says. He shoots Shiro a narrow-eyed glare. “His name isn’t Kosmo.”

“Right,” Shiro says. The space wolf not named Kosmo doesn’t seem to care either way, but Shiro feels like he’s supposed to default to being on Keith’s side on something like this. 

“More importantly,” Thace announces loudly, “I have brought you two the zavimah so that you  _ both _ may have an enjoyable experience while you stay with us. Its powers are well known.”

“ . . . Powers?” Shiro asks, trying to hide his feeling of dread. 

Thace thrusts the blanket enthusiastically into Shiro’s arms and claps his hands on both of Shiro’s shoulders. “This will ensure your stamina for the long nights that lie ahead of you as a couple. We Galra are notoriously difficult to keep up with.”

Shiro chokes.

“Thace!” Keith yells, darting forward to take the quilt and shove it back at Thace, who refuses to take it. “We don’t—oh my god, we don’t need a sex blanket.”

“It is not a sex blanket,” Krolia argues, like that’s a reasonable hill to die on. “It protects virility and energizes those who—”

“Please don’t make me take it, Mom,” Keith begs, but Krolia dumps it right back in his arms.

“It is tradition. You are bound to be wed, and—well.” She shoots Shiro an indecipherable look. “Humans tire easily, Keith, and we only want you to be happy.”

Keith looks like he’s just been served a death sentence and Shiro is pretty sure he looks the same. He tries so hard  _ not _ to think about what Krolia knows about human stamina during sex and why, but it’s impossible to stop picturing it now that she’s put the image in all of their heads. Shiro wishes he could bleach his brain.

“We will leave you two, now,” Krolia says, taking her exit with as much grace as she can. “There is a washroom through that door and extra linens in the closet there, should you need them. Sleep well, my boys.”

Shiro finds himself wrapped up in a hug from Krolia and then Thace in quick succession. He forces a smile onto his face and thanks them both, awkwardly stepping out of the way so Krolia can kiss the side of Keith’s head and hug him and Thace together while the space wolf drags his tongue indiscriminately over them all. It would be a sweet family reunion if not for the sexual virility blanket still stuffed in Keith’s hold, as if that’s something they’re just supposed to be okay about.

“Come, Kosmo,” Krolia says on her way out the door. The wolf gives Keith one last lick and turns, oblivious to the petty glares Keith and Krolia are leveling at each other. Shiro recognizes a well-worn family argument when he sees one.

As soon as the door is closed behind them, Shiro turns to Keith and says, “Hide that blanket, I can never look at it again.”

Keith drops it on the ground unceremoniously and uses a foot to gently shove it away from him. “I hate that,” he says. “I don’t even want to know how many of my relatives have—”

“Don’t say it,” Shiro begs. 

“I wish I could stop thinking about it.” Keith covers his face with both hands and breathes in and out. Shiro wishes he could go to comfort him, but he doesn’t want to catch any . . . energy the blanket might be putting off, and it  _ just _ touched Keith’s arms. It’s fine to stay here and be sympathetic while Keith quietly perishes from embarrassment.

It feels strange to be completely alone with Keith after the long hours spent traveling, crammed into commercial transport ships like sardines. Shiro turns his attention to the bed—the single, lonely bed—taking up most of the room. It looks comfortable and warm and he wants so badly to crawl into it, but the manners his grandparents drilled into him kick in. 

“You can take the bed,” Shiro says, stepping around Keith to where his suitcase sits against the far wall. “I’ll set myself up on the floor with whatever I can find.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Shiro,” Keith says, sounding too tired to be truly annoyed. “Just look at how big it is. We’ll share.”

Shiro could hem and haw over the decision, but truthfully his limbs are so heavy with the desire to lay down that he can’t muster up the energy to argue any more about it. Maybe tomorrow it will all look very different, but Keith is right about the size of the bed. It would be easy to claim half and never even notice he had a bedmate. 

Shiro sighs. “Alright.”

They get ready for bed. Keith takes the bathroom first to wash the wolf spit from his face while Shiro busies himself with setting up the charging port for his prosthetic. His shoulder has started to hurt with a dull ache from having it on for this long, and the battery has dropped lower than Shiro is normally comfortable with. Taking it off feels like a weight lifted from his whole body because it’s a signal he’s about to get some sleep. Not naps on a ship or outside a terminal, no drug-induced mistakes—just real, heavy, dreamless sleep that will feel  _ incredible _ to wake up from tomorrow.

Shiro could weep with excitement.

He trades places with Keith to brush his teeth and make a passing attempt at washing his face. Shiro would love a good shower right now, but when he glances at the thing he thinks is the shower, he finds its controls to be indecipherable and covered in a lot of lettering he can’t read. Keith can explain it to him in the morning. 

Keith is already tucked into one side of the bed when Shiro walks back in. The covers are pulled up over his shoulders against the chill of the air, and Shiro is suddenly grateful that he’s wearing a shirt to bed tonight. Keith's hair is loose around his face, nowhere near brushed smooth, and as Shiro gets closer, the circles under his eyes become more pronounced. Shiro can't imagine he looks much livelier, but he still thinks Keith is adorable like this. It's a rare treat to see Keith with his braid fully undone.

"Mom likes you," Keith says as Shiro pulls the blankets down on his side.

"Good. I'm glad."

"Yeah. Thace, too."

It’s good news, and Shiro wonders then what it was about Kolivan that felt so off, but Keith clearly has something on his mind, something big, and Shiro keeps silent so he doesn't start pushing before Keith is ready to talk. If Keith needs him to stay up and talk just for a little longer, then Shiro will. 

Shiro gets into bed and curls on his side facing Keith. He would never fall asleep on his right side, putting pressure on the port for his prosthetic, but he wants to reassure Keith that he's there and waiting, whenever he's needed.

It doesn't take Keith long.

"Sorry about earlier," he says finally, a frustrated sigh pushing hard out of his chest. "I didn't—didn’t know they were going to do that."

Shiro studies the shape of Keith's profile, the slope of his nose and the part of his lips. "Do what?"

"Ask us about the proposal. And the kissing, I—fuck, I'm sorry. We should have talked about that." Keith shakes his head and shrinks deeper into the covers. "Proposals on Earth are supposed to be about the romance, right? But here it's more like . . . this whole courting ritual thing. You have to earn the right to your engagement by taking care of someone."

"So that's why you kept talking about blankets," Shiro surmises. He laughs to himself—he thinks they pulled it off pretty well, all things considered. "You were just trying to keep your street cred, I get it."

"Shut up, old man," Keith whines. He sinks underneath the blankets fully then, pulling them tight over his head.

"You wanted your mom to think you're cool," Shiro says, struggling to keep his laughter down. "I can't judge."

Keith grumbles something incomprehensible and Shiro breaks, laughing good-naturedly at him. Shiro’s body calls out for rest, but Keith is so magnetic that Shiro never wants to close his eyes. All his unease about discovering the single bed in their shared room has faded away—Keith is his best friend, unequivocally, so why should Shiro care if they sleep next to each other? Zipped up in individual sleeping bags next to each other in a tent in the desert is no different than taking opposite sides of a spacious bed, and they’ve done that first thing plenty of times. There's an element of it that even makes Shiro feel like a kid at a sleepover, a certain childishness and euphoria lingering around them.

But it changes into something else when Keith pushes the covers away. That's when Shiro realizes Keith is shirtless, his pale skin on display down to the middle of his stomach. Shiro tries so hard, but he can’t keep his eyes on Keith's face, can’t resist the urge to quickly trace the long scar from Keith's cheek to his shoulder, to skim his gaze across the dark, soft-looking hair on Keith's abs to the edges of the blankets and wonder how little Keith is wearing. 

Oh, he looks good. He looks so, so good.

“Shiro?”

Shiro jumps. He mumbles, “Your shirt,” because it’s the first thing that comes to mind and he has no control over his mouth anymore, even though the words are so stupid he wants to slap himself. It’s not  _ his _ fault he’s gay and Keith looks like . . . well, like that. Like a sad, pining, gay man’s fantasy. 

Weirdly, he wants to lick the crease of Keith’s armpit. 

But Keith looks down at himself in confusion. “My shirt?”

“I just thought—since it’s cold in here—I mean.” Shiro trails off weakly. “Nevermind.”

“I haven’t worn a shirt to bed since my top surgery,” Keith says, matter-of-fact. Then he tips his head like he’s considering something. “And you should probably know that for the immigration interview.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says. It’s not necessarily a surprise that Keith is shirtless and he definitely should have expected it, but . . . Shiro’s not in his right mind, at the moment. Shiro looks down at his own T-shirt and then says another stupid thing because that’s what his brain is like when he’s exhausted from traveling and social gatherings and an accidental drugging all at once. “Should I take mine off, too? To make it even?”

“I—what?” Keith asks, but Shiro is already in motion. He sits up and pulls his shirt off by the back of the collar, tossing it on the ground beside the bed.

Keith stares at him. Shiro realizes then how completely weird that was, but it’s way too late to take it back. So he just stares placidly back at Keith, giving nothing away but the blush probably covering his face. Just two bros, about to pass out in a shared bed, no shirts, because who the hell needs shirts?

Shiro is still loopy. He’s not sure the drink has completely worn off.

Keith breaks the silence with a laugh. He sinks back against the pillows and covers his face with both hands so he can giggle into them. Shiro is speechless for another moment, but then he breaks too, laughing helplessly at himself and the sheer ridiculousness of everything that’s happened today. It feels good to let it all out, to clutch at his stomach while his body shakes with giddiness, all while Keith does the same right next to him. 

“Okay,” Keith says when he finally stops wheezing. The smile on his face is bright and happy, so full of light. “Okay, jeez. We’re even now.”

They’re super even now. Shiro tugs the blankets up a little higher on his chest to fight off the cool air. “I think that—what did your mom call it? Kralva? It’s still hitting me,” he says honestly. He can think of no other reason why he just whipped his shirt off.

"Kralalva," Keith corrects. He laughs a little. "The alva is sort of like vodka, but they blend it with fruit. It hits humans hard."

Shiro frowns. “I got knocked out by a smoothie?”

“Heh. Yeah.”

"It tasted good," Shiro says wistfully. He doesn't dare risk another fainting episode and will probably never drink it again, but it was good while it lasted. Maybe next time he can just get a bunch of whatever fruit was in there.

"I could tell," Keith says. Then he blushes, inexplicably deep, and continues, "I just mean—when we—I could taste it. You know. It's not a big deal."

Shiro's face heats up hot enough to match Keith's. Oh  _ god, _ Shiro almost managed to forget about the kiss until now.

“Yeah.” Shiro’s voice comes out lower than expected. “You know . . . we’re probably going to have to do that again. Are you okay with that?”

Keith bites his lip, his eyes searching. Shiro wishes he could reassure Keith, but he doesn’t know what to say about this—it feels like every word puts him too close to revealing what he really thinks about Keith. He could ruin them by doing that.

“I am,” Keith says finally. “Are—are you?”

Shiro forces himself to wait for a beat before answering. Is he okay with kissing Keith a few more times in front of his family to prove that they’re an engaged couple who can’t keep their hands or lips off each other? Yeah, he is. “Mhmm,” he says.

Keith leans closer—or is that just Shiro’s imagination? Is he just wishing that Keith would lean closer? Exhaustion wars in Shiro’s mind, but he can’t look away from Keith like this. He’s so close and  _ so _ beautiful—there is no one as special or as exquisite as him, and Shiro would fight anything just for the opportunity to view Keith in a moment that is so vulnerable and unguarded. Like this, Shiro can almost convince himself they’re in this bed together because they both want to be and not because they were steamrolled into it.

“Don’t get mad,” Keith warns.

Shiro blinks in surprise. “Okay,” he says slowly. “Don’t get mad about what?”

That time, Keith definitely shifts closer. There’s still a good foot of space between them on this giant bed, but Shiro is  _ not _ imagining Keith moving toward him. The thought steals his breath.

“That kiss was . . . well, it wasn’t very good,” Keith says. He narrows his eyes. “Not that I think you’re a bad kisser. But we’ve never done that before and it showed.”

_ Never done that before.  _ The phrase hits Shiro like a punch to the gut. He always wondered if Keith remembered the one drunken time they kissed, assuming maybe that Keith never brought it up because he didn’t want to deal with any lingering awkwardness. It shouldn’t hurt like a rejection, but it shreds a line of hope that Shiro held onto for a very long time. As if proof of a romantic undertone to Keith’s friendship could be found in him denying the one time he admitted he wanted to kiss Shiro.

Keith doesn’t even remember. Shiro feels hollow.

“Right,” he says, trying hard to keep his voice steady. 

“I think we need to practice kissing.”

Shiro’s throat closes up like an allergic reaction.  _ Practice.  _ Practice  _ kissing? _ Kiss Keith platonically  _ again,  _ while they’re both sober and certainly both going to remember it? He doesn’t know what to do.

“Shiro?”

Coughing to break the tension and get his vocal cords in working order, Shiro turns his head away. Maybe he heard that wrong. Did Keith  _ really  _ just look him in the eye and proposition him to make out in this bed while they’re both shirtless until they get good at it with each other? No. No, there’s  _ no way _ Shiro heard that because the drug was that made him pass out earlier is probably also a hallucinogenic and he should probably go find Keith’s mom and ask where the nearest doctor is and can Shiro please make an urgent appointment with—

“Shiro.”

“Yeah?” he croaks. Shiro turns his face back to Keith’s but focuses his gaze on a point just past Keith’s ear.

“Do you think we should?” Keith presses. 

Shiro swallows hard. “It—it would probably make us look more convincing,” he mutters, and that’s  _ true _ technically, but also Shiro wants to pull the blankets up over his head and scream hysterically. He wants to slap himself for saying yes while knowing full well this is just going to make him feel worse about himself. He doesn’t need to be reminded of how good it feels to kiss Keith.

Keith nods. “You’re right,” he says, and then he closes the last of the space between their bodies. He lays right in front of Shiro, their heads sharing the same pillow, and Shiro falls into the galactic depths of his eyes. 

This time, they’re both completely cognizant of their actions. This time, they are alone, in a bed, occupying a world that feels like it belongs to only them, and nothing in the universe can stop them or make this seem like a good idea. Shiro shouldn’t—he knows he shouldn’t, knows that kissing Keith here is far different than a few seconds in front of Keith’s family or at an alcohol-soaked party. It’s a heavy weight to carry, and still, Shiro can’t stop himself.

He stares at Keith’s mouth. “You’re sure?” he whispers.

“Yeah,” Keith murmurs back. “Can’t let you get deported for this, right? It’s what friends are for.”

That strikes Shiro straight through the heart.

Keith makes the first move. His hand reaches out to touch Shiro’s cheek, his fingertips skimming like butterfly wings across Shiro’s skin. The hair raises on Shiro’s arm just from that, and when Keith urges him to close his eyes, Shiro can do nothing but obey.

The first kiss is gentle and timid. It comes right when Shiro expects it—Keith’s breath ghosts over his mouth and the mattress bends when he leans in, and so Shiro can’t be surprised. After, their lips hover just out of reach, and Shiro wonders if Keith can hear how hard his heart is beating. Anticipation hangs in the air like the threat of lightning.

The second one takes Shiro by surprise.

Keith flies in, firm and demanding like he’s realized what Shiro wants. It’s as if the awkward missteps from earlier were a fluke—now, it’s like the first time all over again. They fit together seamlessly, moving through the kiss like they’re well-worn dance partners: Shiro’s head tilts to get more comfortable and Keith follows with effortless grace. He loses himself in the movement of Keith’s lips, in the hand holding his jaw, and when the kiss breaks, Shiro whispers, “That wasn’t bad.”

A tiny huff of breath from Keith, and then he surges forward into Shiro again, hand slipping from Shiro’s jaw to his shoulder, pushing him down against the bed so Keith can follow, their bare skin just inches apart. Shiro could choke in surprise, but Keith’s mouth stays pressed to his, lips parted and soft, and Shiro can’t do anything but kiss him back and hope this never ends. Keith kisses like all Shiro’s dreams come true, even better than the soft, hazy memories of the first time this happened. Keith’s body is so warm, his mouth even hotter, and when his hair falls against Shiro’s face, Shiro sweeps it out of the way. He tucks the strands behind Keith’s ear, out of the way,

“Thanks,” Keith says against his mouth when he takes a breath.

“Mmm,” Shiro says as Keith descends again. 

Shiro keeps his hand at the back of Keith’s neck because he doesn’t dare move lower, doesn’t know what he would do if he came into contact with that empty canvas of skin. Keith is strong, built of carefully honed muscle and uncompromising dedication, and Shiro will not  _ survive _ contact with that. Sweat-soaked sparring on a gym mat doesn’t come close to what this feels like. Shiro fears now that if his hands touch Keith’s body, he won’t be able to stop himself from surrendering completely.

But it’s not like he thinks he’ll survive the first brush of Keith’s tongue against Shiro’s lower lip, either.

A voice in the back of Shiro’s head tells him that this is far enough. They don’t need to go any further or make it any weirder, but then Shiro has to ask himself why it would be  _ weird _ and he can only admit that it’s his romantic feelings that would make this weird. If Shiro just wanted to be Keith’s friend, he wouldn’t care at all about a little tongue. This is fully Shiro’s fault. 

So he lets Keith kiss him with an open mouth and tongue and Shiro does his best to return the favor, kissing Keith back fiercely enough that he has to keep pushing Keith’s hair out of the way. Shiro’s never kissed a man with such long hair before and he’s shocked by how much he likes it, how enjoyable it is to have the opportunity to gather Keith’s soft hair in his hand and try to hold it out of the way at the base of Keith’s neck. Keith laughs at how futile the struggle is, and Shiro has to join him. The bangs that frame Keith’s face normally are their own beast and Shiro can’t stop it all at once, so he just grabs Keith by the smiling cheek and pulls him back in, uncaring about whose hair is where. 

There’s a tiny noise from Keith that Shiro recognizes belatedly as a moan. That knowledge sends a spark of arousal zinging from between Shiro’s thighs all the way up to his heart.

Keith presses closer so he’s half on top of Shiro, his hands getting greedy where they slip over Shiro’s shoulders and bicep, chests still never touching. His nails of one hand graze the sensitive skin of Shiro’s neck in the same moment his other hand squeezes Shiro’s upper arm, completely lost in the kiss. 

Shiro tries so hard to lose himself too. He wants to forget everything and revel in how good Keith feels over him, how perfectly they fit together and how sweet Keith's quiet noises are. But no matter how much he loves this, Shiro cannot forget that this isn’t real, that Keith is just his best friend and a really good kisser and he isn’t doing this because he shares Shiro’s feelings. He kisses Shiro like he loves him, his touch tender and proprietary, but he doesn’t mean it.

He will never mean it the way Shiro needs.

Shiro’s hand trembles with the urge to cry and he balls it into a tight fist behind Keith to hide that. 

The kiss breaks. Keith presses his forehead to Shiro’s while he catches his breath, his eyes still closed. Shiro only knows that because he had to open his own out of wonder and curiosity and pain. 

This is already haunting him.

“Think we got that figured out,” Shiro murmurs. He gets to watch Keith’s eyelashes flutter open and the corners of his reddened lips turn up in high definition as he pulls away.

Keith strokes a thumb over Shiro’s jaw. “You sure?”

God. Shiro doesn’t have a single clue what that’s supposed to mean. He refuses to have hope.

“Yeah,” he says, because what else could he answer with? Shiro tries to continue, but a yawn overtakes him, cracking his jaw with the force of it.

“I should let you sleep,” Keith says. His hand lifts from Shiro’s face to push his hair out of his face. Shiro swears he’s seen Keith out of his braid before—they’ve known each other so long, it would be impossible not to—but the intimate details of how it gets in his face when it’s loose are an unknown quantity. 

“Mm. We—we’ve had a long day.”

Keith sits up the rest of the way to roll back to his side of the bed. Shiro watches him with some unknown emotion swirling inside him—all he can do is mourn Keith’s shoulders disappearing underneath the covers again as he gets out of the cool air. He has a lot to think about, but his mind is still dragging, caught on the mole that adorns Keith’s collarbone and unwilling to untangle and interpret Keith’s behavior.

Keith catches him watching and offers a tiny grin. 

“I’m glad I’m doing this with you,” Shiro confesses. It comes out of nowhere, but it’s the only truth.

Keith’s smile grows, but he hides it when he turns to the side to switch off the lamp beside the bed. The room plunges into pitch-black darkness so heavy that Shiro’s eyelids fall closed in defense.

“Goodnight, Shiro,” Keith whispers.

“Night, Keith.”

Shiro falls asleep far more quickly than he expects with the taste of Keith on his lips and the smell of his hair all around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> twitter @[disloyalpunk](https://twitter.com/disloyapunk)
> 
> thank you for reading <3

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you think!! i love to hear thoughts and questions, and you can find me also on [twitter](http://twitter.com/disloyalpunk)!


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